August 8 – Honfleur, France

20 degrees, mostly clear

Last night was spent sailing the English Channel from England to France where we arrive early this afternoon. Arriving in the afternoon, means that we are able to sleep in and do what we like this morning – we did very little.

harbour sailboats

Chris and I visited Honfleur when we were on a river cruise of Northern France a few years back. This is fortunate as in this area of France is where Claude Monet’s painted his Water Lilies. We visited his house and gardens, near Honfleur, but still requires a 90 minute drive each way. I’m glad we visited this before because I’d want to do it for sure, but wouldn’t be too keen on the 90 min drive to get

harbour

there.

In the late afternoon we join a walking tour of Honfleur. Honfleur is a charming little town

filled with half-timber houses. These houses are interesting because they expand as they get taller – in the past you had to pay taxes based on the land the building occupied, so they built the building into the street on the second floor – it looks like the street as narrowing.

With a guide we walked the cobbled, narrow, old (crowded) streets listening as she described the town and its history. We saw the old port, churches, art galleries, cafes, and cider shops. At one point we stopped to sample a combo of 1/3 calvados, 2/3 apple juice – quite tasty and then we tried calvados – basically an apple brandy specific to the area. Then we stopped for a crepe and a glass of cider – very good.

After a bit of time on our own when we wandered on our own, we were back to the ship.

Chris and I decided to rent a portable wifi device for this trip. On our last cruise because we had been with that cruise company for a bunch of nights we had unlimited wifi, this time because we are on a different line we only get one hour per day for each of us. That’s quite a lot for the occasional email or a bit of googling, but for blogging we thought it could be tight. So far this device is great on land, not so much on the ship. We didn’t expect it to be great when we were sailing, but when we are docked it isn’t great either – good just not great.