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Published: September 2nd 2013
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This is starting to sound like we are going between places where our next stay will be the next letter in the alphabet
With the sky overcast but looking promising for some sun and the temperature starting to warm up we said our farewell to Romuald and his wife and were very sorry to be leaving the apartment. It has been the type of place we would like to pack up and take with us such has the comfort of it all been
With another 300+ kilometres ahead of us we plan just to take the fastest route that Victoria works out for us and although it won’t give much if any time for sightseeing during the day we will make up for it after Caen when we have a 4 night stop arranged.
The local farmers were all busy in their fields as summer comes towards its end and they preparing themselves for the autumn and winter ahead.
One of the noticeable things in this very rural area is the waft from time to time of the muck taken from storage and spread out onto the fields as fertiliser once the summer crop has been removed
and the field ploughed. We know they have to do something with it and the nutrients are being returned to the soil but we wonder how long it would take living here permanently to not notice it.
The amount of muck that falls off the trailers being towed from the sheds to the paddocks onto the road meant that you couldn’t avoid driving through it. This would never be allowed in NZ these days, not even on rural roads, we think.
The road south took us through St Omer, which, even in the sun, didn’t look any more inviting than it did in the rain. The D928was a fairly direct route to Abbeville which we managed to skirt around to save getting caught up in heavier and slower traffic. Here we had the option of heading towards the coast and carry on past the D-Day beaches.However; we visited the beaches in 2009 and so decided to carry on the fastest route towards Rouen, another large city that we hoped Vicky would be able to direct us to avoid. The E402 is a 130kph highway and meant we could make good time. But it also meant trucks in large
numbers and we must say we prefer roads without them necessitating less overtaking.
There was a sort of a bypass around Rouen and it would probably have worked well except that in the middle of it was a major bridge over the Seine River that was closed for repairs and the diversion took us close to the city centre. We missed one turn but Vicky soon has us back on track and before long we cleared the city and were back out on the open road again.
We had booked ourselves an overnight stay at a Première Classe hotel in Caen Nord to break the journey to Lehon, a suburb of Dinan.Fortunately Caen had a very efficient ring road system and we went from one road to another effortlessly.
The hotel, which had only been open a short while, was located, as many of these chain hotels are, in industrial areas near off ramps from the main highways. This one though was in an area that still had a lot of vacant land around it and farmland across the back fence, over which our room had an outlook which made for a stunning sunset later on. We are not great fans of the chain hotels having been spoilt with apartments with cooking facilities and of much more room but this one at least didn’t have that smell that tends to build up in small rooms being used by a wide range of people usually just for one night. Mind you we might not have helped cooking our microwavable dinners although we did make sure the window was wide open.
We watched the next two episodes in the BBC Dunkirk Evacuation series and called it a night in very peaceful surroundings and a surprisingly comfortable bed.
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