End of Week 2 – Sunday 14 July – Honfleur and Bastille Day

!4^th of July, and Bastille Day – well apparently not, at least not to the French, who refer to it as the Fete National. Apparently, they are celebrating the 14^th of July 1790, which is the year after the storming of the Bastille.  In 1790, they had the Fete de la Federation, which was the celebration of the uprising of the modern nation and the reconciliation of all the French inside the constitutional monarchy which preceded the first republic during the French Revolution.  So there.

We have now moved onto Normandy.  We had planned to have a night camping, but turned up to the campground to find it had a water slide, an overcrowded swimming pool, an overcrowded car park, and had all the appeal of Butlins on steroids, so we booked an extra night in the hotel that we had booked in Honfleur, and it was very lucky that we did too.

The trip over to Normandy was pretty quick, and only a couple of hours – you can cover a lot of distance on the French motorways, which you have to pay for, but the speed is nice, and so much easier to concentrate on, than chugging around at 70-90ks on the small back roads.  Also, if you’ve got any distance to cover, going through a small French town every couple of ks, and getting stuck behind campervans and trucks soon loses its appeal.  Our GPS this year is a more advanced model, which tells us what the streets are called and what the motorway signs say – well, that’s what it is trying to do, but in the last week we’d heard things like Brook Sellers and Por-e, so we knew the pronunciation was either very French, or a little misguided – Brook Sellers was of course Brussels, and Por-e, Paris – of course!

We’d booked into a Best Western in Honfleur, because it met all our criteria – in the historical centre, not a big hotel, character, and in the right price range.  What we didn’t know, was that there was a massive fireworks display planned for July 14, that our Hotel was right on the edge of the harbour, and the fireworks would all be going off from about 100m away from our hotel, and that our room looked right out over the whole show.  When we arrived into the town, we had to crawl along the road to find the hotel – there were people everywhere. What should have taken two minutes took half an hour, and it was a beautiful hot day – 28 degrees – really nice.  There were thousands of people in the town, particularly for the celebrations, and all the restaurants around the Marina were full of people, there were performers keeping the crowds happy, people were letting off firecrackers – really big ones – all round the place, kids were there on their noisy motorbikes, it was just crazy, but lots of fun.  

The fireworks went off about 11:00, then there was a bit of a disco, more fire crackers, people tooting cars, partying all that stuff, so it was a cool night.