Miscellaneous Observations

Today I want to share some random observations from our first eight days in Louviers.

First, there are a few things I want to find out. For instance, you're tooling along through a little village at the posted speed of about 45 mph, and you encounter this:

I know what to do, but at a very deep level, although I love the idea of putting a pot of flowers in the street, I'm not quite sure why it's this way.  Is it to slow down traffic? Sometimes there are a couple of parking places nestled in beyond the pylons, but in this case there are none.

On the other end of the speed spectrum is the open road.  You're enchanted by the wheat fields "ripe unto harvest" and bam! this, and you're going 60 mph.  In case you don't quite grasp the scale, let me simplify it for you--there's not room for all four of your tires to stay on the road.

And in daily life in town, since the roads were designed for carts about 600 years ago, occasionally you get behind a truck delivering furniture to a local shop.  Patience, please.  In case you can't quite see that far into the distance, that's eleven cars waiting on this guy.  But that's the way things are; I didn't hear a single beep of horn or shout of anger.

Here are a few architectural items that didn't quite make the cut earlier.

The old entrance to the Bec-Hellouin abbey is what I think of as the Pen and Pencil set:

At the ruins of Jumiéges was this remarkable set of new chimes.  There are 24 tapered carbon fiber  rods, about 15 feet high with a matching set suspended above them, each marked with a blue dot.  They are played to mark the canonical hours according to Benedictine tradition.

Keeping to the geometric theme, here is the vault of the private chapel at Chantilly:

and the bridge over the Seine between Honfleur and Le Havre.  We have a funny story about this bridge.  When we did our road trip two years ago, on our first excursion from Honfleur we wanted to go west, but I miscounted exits on the roundabout and we crossed this bridge, paying a Euro 7.50 toll (about $8).  We didn't want to go to Le Havre, so I made the first U-Turn possible and crossed the bridge again, for another Euro 7.50.  So counting is an economically valuable skill when driving in France.

Much less geometric, and in a way an indicator of the French way of putting an artistic touch into as much of their lives as possible, these are chimney pots in Honfleur.

Since we don't have 900-year-old stone walls in the US, we generally think of them as long-lasting, but in the rest of the world, the sight of crumbling stone walls is commonplace, and here's a glimpse of how it happens.  This little 3-inch hole appeared as a result of temperature extremes, and soon this plant started putting down roots.  Left alone, the roots grow, extend the crack in the wall and, a few generations of neglect later, down it comes.

Back at "home", we are not tired of our neighbor, the church of Our Lady (Eglise Notre Dame) of Louviers, seen here with the setting sun reflecting off the window across from our front yard.

Tomorrow we're off to Rouen, where the featured attraction is the tallest church in all of France.  There are other points of interest as well, so we'll just spend the day there.