Fecamp and Etretat

Well, today was interesting, in some of those unexpected ways that seem to make up the meat of our vacations.  Our plan was to visit two picturesque coastal towns and finish the afternoon in the museum in Honfleur, one of Anita's favorite towns in France.  I guess two out of three is okay in most cases.

We started in Fécamp, the northernmost town in our plans for this year.  If you want to locate it on your map, it's just northeast along the English Channel coast from Le Havre, which is at the mouth of the Seine river.  We arrived just in time for lunch (wow, who knew--food!) at La Suite, one of many beach-side restaurants that offered really nice menus at surprisingly reasonable prices.

I had the dish I'd been looking forward to for weeks: mussels.  That's probably a more common food in Normandy than chicken is in New Mexico.  They remind me of something I once heard about celery--that the energy it takes to eat it exceeds the calorie count consumed. But unlike celery, these were scrumptious!

Anita's choice was sole, and the skeleton structure just slid gracefully off, leaving melt-in-your-mouth fillets.

Fécamp and Etretat are both in a region of the channel that display marvelous white cliffs.  They aren't as pure white as Dover's, but for a boy who grew up on the gulf coast of Texas, these are pretty impressive.

Fécamp is also home to a most surprising "palace," the Palais Benedictine.  Now I'll confess--I knew exactly one context for the word "Benedictine," the monastic order characterized by the black robes worn by the monks. But it turns out that, according to the guy who made a fortune on it, one of them developed a recipe for liqueur that caught on in a big way.  In 1882, Alexandre-Prosper Le Grand decided that what Fécamp needed was a combination art museum and distillery for Benedictine Liqueur.  This is the result:

After bidding farewell to Fécamp, we moved a few dozen kilometers down the coast to Etretat.  We had put it on our list when we saw a French police movie that was filmed in Etretat, and it looked like a lovely place.  It is a lovely place, but I'm now pretty certain that the movie was NOT filmed on the day after National Day on a four-day weekend.  Check out these beach crowds:

That rock formation jutting out into the sea is the most recognizable landmark of Etretat.  There's a matching one in the opposite direction that was the subject of one of Monet's paintings.

Since we had lunch in Fécamp, we felt obliged to have dessert in Etretat.  It seems that the Normandy region has its version of apple pie, in the sense that if nothing is more American than apple pie, then nothing is more Norman than "Coupe Normande", a melange of peppermint sorbet and apples, all swimming in calvados, a local apple brandy.  Yummmmm.

So what happened to Honfleur, you say?  Scroll back up and check those last two beach scenes; we used up all our time looking for a place to park.  Honfleur tomorrow, and maybe a few other special stops as well.