Lingering Down the Lane(Paul Weston Orchestra 1952) A day at Cape de la Hague and Cherbourg

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The apartment we are staying in is located down an isolated narrow country lane about 3km from the small village of Sainte-Colombe.

As the sun rose through the misty haze this morning it revealed that overnight there had been a frost although this quickly evaporated as the sun for the first time we had noticed since arriving seemed to have some warmth in it.

As Nadine had told us when we arrived a small number of cars arrived as we getting ourselves ready for the day. They had bought in young girls for their pony club lessons.

The property is very well set up with an equestrian centre which includes stables an area of ground with a pony circuit including jumps and a room set aside with a blackboard and chairs for the girls to receive whatever verbal training they need.

In the yard there are chickens and a friendly goat who had greeted us yesterday along with Nadine’s dog and a couple of farm cats.

Today’s sightseeing will take us to Cape de la Hague at the tip of the Cotentin peninsula and then onto Cherbourg before returning home.

We set off down the narrow lane hoping that no other vehicle would becoming towards us as there really wasn’t anywhere to pass although we are sure the locals must know how to do it. The ‘bocage’or hedge is all neatly trimmed but at a height it is difficult to see either past or over from the road.

We successfully got to the main road and headed for Valognes the nearest town with a supermarket to buy our lunch baguette and whatever sweet treat that might be on offer. The traditional boulangerie do not appear to be in abundance in the small villages anymore and perhaps it is the growth of the prolific supermarkets that have made them struggle to survive.

The Intermarche looked brand new but still had that smell about it which we have put down to the large display of ‘fresh’ (?) fish the supermarkets have for sale. It seems to permeate the air as you enter, like the smell of sulphur in Rotorua, but dissipates as you spend more time in the store.

As we had mentioned in an earlier blog we will expand a bit on supermarkets in France and how they compare to New Zealand.

By the end of today we will have visited at least one store in each of the 5 main chains that operate at least in the north of France and that excludes the German stores of Lidl which have also been present in some locations to date.

Because the small towns we have been to have been established for hundreds of years there is no room for what is called ‘Commercial’ to be developed in the centre of the town. So you find them on the outskirts sometimes along with the small industrial zones also set up.

The checkout operators are very slow and queues have always been evident when we have visited.And, until we visited an Auchan store at the end of the day we hadn’t spotted oneself checkout.

It was around 50km to the Cape and the road for most of the way was a divided highway enabling us to make good time at 110kph at a very steady rate.

We both agreed how easy the drive would be between Auckland and Wellington if the road was like this one in France all the way.

However, even with the two lanes the weekend cyclists were out in force and one has to be wary of them as they wander a bit on the road.

The land towards this part of the coast is more undulating than further inland in Normandy although there were still no prominent hills to get a fix on although the compass on the GPS unit is great for telling us which direction we are heading.

Near the last village of Auderville before the Cape we came across the world’s largest nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. Here, around half of the world’s light water reactor spent nuclear fuel is prepared to be reprocessed to mixed oxide fuel for electricity generation. This is done at another plant in France.

To say that the plant was anything but enormous would be a gross understatement as it spread over a vast amount of the scenery towards the coast in one direction. Yet it wasn’t a 24/7 operation as there were only a few cars in the workers car park and there was almost no activity from vehicles that you would expect to see operating inside the plant.

Through the quaint village of Auderville and down the hill and we were at the Cape.

It wasn’t quite what we were expecting, which was steep cliffs that we normally associated with the end of a piece of land before the sea, as it was flat.

However that did mean we could take a walk along a high stony bank or wall that looked like it had been principally manmade to protect the farmland from the wild Atlantic storms that batter this coastline.

Today however was absolutely calm and sunny and we couldn’t have got a better day to visit this scenic spot.

We took a stroll along the bank to what appeared to be a WW2 concrete bunker about a kilometre away. Upon closer inspection there wasn’t any opening facing the sea for guns to be set up through and we wondered if part of the structure might have been destroyed or pulled down.

Off shore there was a small boat with men putting out craypots and on a rocky outcrop there were large shag type birds sunning themselves.

Our stroll took us close to an hour and by the time we got back to the small settlement of deserted houses and an old coastguard building crowds of people had arrived and had taken up most of the available seats to have their lunch.

Luckily we found a small bench out of the light breeze and tucked into our fresh baguette, cheese and salami topped off with a chocolate cream filled éclair. We can feel the pounds going on!

A man arrived in a 4 wheel drive with a boat on a trailer and we pondered how he was going to launch this on his own. By the time we had finished our lunch he had it in the water all by himself.

As we headed north towards Cherbourg the outside temperature rose to 12C.

Driving along the foreshore towards the small city we took in the large WW2 gun emplacements still prominent at the outer edges of the large harbour. Cherbourg had been a strategic port for the Germans in WW2 and they had defended it fiercely during the D-Day landings.

Like Falaise yesterday, much of the downtown area is post WW2 construction as the town would have taken considerable shelling before it surrender to the Allies.

There are a number of WW2 exhibitions one can visit in the city but we shall hold off indulging in the D-Day landing stuff until tomorrow when we visit Utah beach.

Downtown Cherbourg was a pleasant place to stroll and on a Saturday afternoon everyone and the traffic were in weekend mode.

The drive home was direct and much quicker than our outward journey and we made it back as the Pony club was winding down for the day.

It had been a lovely day out accompanied by sunny but cool weather and again it wouldn’t be too long after dinner that sleep would beckon.

PS:Todays song title is very,very obscure but it seemed appropriate to the narrow country lane our apartment is on.

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