Divided Highway(The Doobie Brothers-1991)Sainte Colombe,Normandy to Squiffiec,Brittany

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Monday, and its departure day from our farmhouse apartment in Normandy and we will head onto Brittany for another Air BnB rural location.

We finished the cleaning and loaded Peggy up and were ready to depart 20 minutes before we thought we would be ready.

Then we got thrown another curve ball, a bit like the missing travel card at Breteuil although this time it was the second key for the house that had disappeared from the kitchen table.

We started unloading the various bags from the car to check if the key had fallen into one of them and it wasn’t until we got down to the smallest items that we found the key in Gretchen’s handbag.

We could now leave with everything in tact as we had found it.

Nadine wasn’t home so we headed off without saying a formal goodbye but we will leave favourable comments on the webpage for her apartment on Air BnB as our stay had been very comfortable and we had wanted for nothing. Perfect!

We had spotted the German cemetery passing through the village of Orglandes yesterday and so we retraced our path to take a short time to call in and view the final resting place of just over 10,000 German casualties from the D-Day invasion on this part of the Normandy coast.

As we have seen in the past the memorial grounds and structures are similar for the German soldiers but just don’t have the crisp look about them as the Allied cemeteries have.

The German memorials and grave markers are grey whereas the Allied ones are usually a gleaming white and perhaps this is the way they were supposed to be represented when they are on foreign soil, at least to the Germans.

The grave crosses stretched out as far as one could see and there were three bodies to a site front and back of the grave cross.

There had been a car parked outside but this belonged to the caretaker cutting the grass to keep things neat and tidy. When he stopped mowing there was an eerie silence.

The visitors book in the memorial structure which was plain in design and did not carry any information as to battles that took place in the area as we have found in Allied cemetaries,did not have any recent entries. One gets the feeling that Germans who had relatives killed in WW2 on foreign soil would rather forget where they are buried.

We headed away for the D650 to take us to the coast and the drive down to Granville at the bottom of the Cotentin peninsula.

Traffic was light and we enjoyed a good run through pleasant farmland being prepared for summer crops and occasionally glimpse of the seaside.

Arriving at the outskirts there was a sign announcing that Granville had been the birth place of Christian Dior in 1905 confirming that even small towns give rise to important people.

One of the features we have noted in France is that as you enter a town there is usually a large sign that gives indication to the town’s history or scenic feature.

The old town sits high on the promontory about a safe harbour with seawalls.

Parking down at the harbour we walked up a steep path that took us to an entrance to the old town that would have been part of the wall of the town years ago but was still in place with a wooden drawbridge and the remains of a moat below that you had to cross to enter the town.

Cobbled streets and a lot of unoccupied 3 and 4 story buildings made up the town although to be fair there was also some renovations of old houses going on too.

The views from various advantage points over the sea were stunning despite the spring haze.

The German occupation in WW2 saw considerable defences built on Point du Roc and some of these remain today. The view of any defender out into the English Channel from this location was extensive.

We returned to the harbour for what is now becoming the traditional lunch of baguette. This time though I had opted for a pate spread while Gretchen stuck with her ham, although the varieties one can buy at the supermarket are endless and today’s version was Serrano .

A ferry to the Channel Islands was tied up across the harbour from our car park and one idea we had considered was a day trip to one of the islands.However, we had probably made the right decision not to do this as although the weather is fine the temperature is still cold and it might not have turned out this way had we decided to spend time here to take a trip. It will have to wait for next time, the BBA V4!

We had indicated an arrival at Squiffiec after 5pm and Gina had our arrival at 4pm with no further stops. So knowing that we had more to sightsee on the way and some supermarket shopping to do we drove on down the coast towards Avranches and the bottom of the Gulf de St Malo

We drove through small seaside towns which virtually ran into each other and in truth were probably suburbs of Granville.

Neat white washed painted houses lined the road we travelled and were evident down to the beachline.There didn’t seem to be many permanent residents as the shutters on many of the homes were closed and that would have been because of the heat from the sun! Although the outside temperature had reached 14C, the warmest we have felt since arriving just under a week ago, as we drove on.

Climbing up from the run along the beach a view of Mont-St-Michel came into sight. For the whole day so far we had often passed signs pointing the way to this prominent place which are there for the pilgrims who make the trip to the cone like island which is joined to the shore by a causeway. We guess the signs have been in place a long time as it doesn’t seem likely that today there would be many pilgrims making their way there on foot but rather by car or train or a bus and not in need of frequently placed road signs as in days before GPS.

After Avranches the road became two lane divided highway and 110kph the speed limit which we took advantage of to get to our destination around the time we had planned.

The land we were travelling over was flooded in parts and appears below sea level when we looked towards the seaside in the distance.

Spring seems more advanced each day and near St Malo there were trees with a good amount of new leaves.

A stop at St Brieuc for some supermarket shopping and a top up of petrol left us 30 minutes to run to our ‘cottage between the land and the sea’ as our Air BnB abode was titled.

As arranged Gretchen phoned the man who was looking after the cottage for the owner who was away somewhere. He didn’t speak or seemingly understand English and she couldn’t understand his French. However he did accept we were getting close to the cottage.

We found the Rue de Saint-Gilda’s or we should say Gina did and we drove down looking for a cottage that looked like the one in the photo and also for Jean Noel who we thought would be waiting outside a cottage for us.

On the third drive along the country road of about 700 metres we stopped and asked a couple working in their garden but their English was no better than Jean Noel had been on the phone.

Then as we walked back to Peggy along came Jean Noel and he beckoned us to follow him to a cottage at a crossroads we had discounted earlier as it being the place we wanted.

He had a woman with him, presumably his wife, and between all four of us we got the general idea of the important things and places inside the cottage.

He had set a fire earlier which although it was warming up the interior it was also making it rather smoky.

One thing they appeared to indicate was that there was no hot water although we couldn’t be sure whether that was because they had only just turned on the cylinder.

We got about doing things, making dinner when suddenly just as the outside light was fading the power went off! Was it just us or the whole road? A quick look revealed it was just us and we regretted not having asked where the fuse box was when Jean Noel was showing us around the cottage.

We eventually found it and threw the cut out switch and the power came back on. A good lesson to ensure we didn’t have too many appliances and lights going at once.

After an hour or so and when we were just thinking things were settling down the power went out again. This time we were upstairs and the place was pitch black.

With the aid of the wind up torch we located Gretchen’s battery torch and together we went back to the fuse box to correct the situation.

Approaching 10.30pm we checked the hot water before we went to bed and as the water coming through was stone cold we sent an email to Emma, the owner, outlining the situation and hoping like heck that there is hot water for a shower in the morning.

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