Today was a sad day; we left our delightful apartment in Paris to head off to new sights. We took the train from Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport, where we rented a car (van, really) with which to tour the Normandy area. From CDG, we went to Rouen to enjoy a cathedral that is known as the ‘most beautiful’ of the French cathedrals. We also walked the surrounding medieval streets and got some yummy pastries.

After Rouen, we next drove to Etretat, which has a broad Pebble beach bookended by amazing cliffs. We arrived after sunset, but we’re still able to enjoy the scene.

Now fully dark, we had two more hours of driving before arriving at our last stop for the day: Bayeaux.

A funny/warning story: Our metro tickets allowed us to pass through from the metro station into the train station. We failed to buy train tickets to go from Paris to the airport; when we arrived at the airport (a 20 minute train ride) our metro tickets would not allow us to exit through the turnstiles into the airport…. and there’s no way to get out, except to go back to Paris, buy the correct tickets, and come back!

Pro tip: purchase the correct tickets in Paris.

We got very lucky: a woman who was passing by saw that we were having a problem. She was an airport employee, who volunteered to go get us tickets (from the airport kiosks, on the other side of the turnstiles) and bring them back to us. She did this with her own credit card (I did repay with cash) and thereby made our big problem go away. Whoever who are, nice airport woman, thank you.

Etretat beach

Bayeaux was founded as a Roman settlement in the 1st century BC with the name Augustodurum, Bayeaux had a busy medieval history, with many viking raids, wars between Normans and Franks and much else. It was the first French city liberated after the 1944 Normandy invasion. We look forward to learning more about this history.