For various reasons, I have only ever holidayed abroad once. For many years I was half of a caravanning couple, and there was so much to see and do without the time and expense of a long tow and a ferry crossing. More recently, camping alone with a motorcycle, I suppose it just hasn't occurred to me.
This year, the urge took me to go to France. Planning began when the idea struck, in early July, and by the day before departure I had everything sorted. I thought.
Green card no longer necessary. Camping carnet. Passport. Vehicle documents and driving licence. Barclaycard - all my traveller friends told me the best and cheapest way to get cash is to use plastic at the Bureau de Change on the ferry or at any French bank. Ferry tickets from Poole - at 33 UK pounds, Poole to Cherbourg was half the price of Dover to Calais for a sixty-hour return.
The holiday was not without incident! To begin with, the Bureau de Change on the Barfleur would not, in fact, take my card and I arrived in Cherbourg early on Sunday evening with no francs and precious little in sterling. However, I got cash from a change-billeterie in the town of Barfleur (yes, like the boat - or rather the other way round); which was just as well: the French are much less willing to accept plastic for small amounts - 100F seems to be about the minimum, more than GBP12. Later, I was to find that the banks did not want to accept the card over the counter either, and referred me to a distributeur.
I thought it was a good omen when I passed through customs without so much as a passport check. Five miles down the road, I was pulled over by the gendarmerie in a spot check. Very disconcerting!
"Bonjour, monsieur. Vous presentez votre permit a conduire, s'il vous plait." Yes, that's easy. "Et ... pour le moto?" Presumably he didn't know what the documents would be called in English. I gave him the MoT from my wallet, and whilst I was digging for the log book in my luggage he asked for my insurance. I passed him the log book, and went back to my wallet for the certificate. "Non, c'est assez, c'est en ordre." Never argue with a foreign policeman. If he tells you your log book is a valid certificate of insurance, smile. Politely.
"Et ... la lampe. En France, pour les motos, toujours la lampe. Day and night." I apologised brokenly but profusely, cursing those who write "you must remember" lists for travellers and don't include special laws affecting motorcyclists.
My first evening, in Barfleur, was enchanting. The camping municipale is on the edge of this most attractive village, from whence, as I learned, one William Duke of Normandy sailed in 1066 to become Guillaume Conquérant d'Angleterre. They are understandably proud of him.
I walked along the quay, bought barbecued pork and sausage in French bread for a meal and washed it down with Normandy cider, served in a wide, shallow earthenware cup rather than a glass. As dusk fell, I sat looking over the harbour, watching the flash from the tall, slim tower of Gatteville-le-Phare lighthouse and listening to the quarter-chimes of the church clock. (Incidentally, whereas in England the Westminster chimes are ubiquitous, Norman church clocks all seem to have a two-tone "Ding-dong..." chime). The following morning, I ate fresh, warm croissants à beurre using the sea wall as my table. Idyllic!
When I told friends I was going to Normandy there was (except among those who know me best) a tendency to assume I was going to see the 1945 Normandy Landing beaches: not so. I wanted to ride by the sea, and I wanted to see the cathedrals of Normandy, of which the earliest influenced, and late ones were influenced by, English cathedral architecture. So on my first morning I drove along the beautiful, peaceful coast - so different from the crowded, overdeveloped, tatty south coast of England - turning inland at the estuary of the Taute to visit Carentan cathedral.
It was like magic. Even before I entered, I could see the magnificence of the building in its market-town setting, and hear that someone was playing the organ. Inside, I took time to look around and listen. French cathedrals seem to have a different "feel". Partly, they are Catholic; partly, the semicircular apse gives the building a round effect different from the common English arrangement of a rectangular eastern lady chapel, and the transepts seem shorter. But the great treat of this cathedral to me as an organist, was to hear played a French instrument built in 1804 (1806?) and virtually unchanged since. This is significant because the tonal design of French instruments changed radically in the mid-nineteenth century, and most major nstruments were rebuilt in the new style at one time or another.
From Carentan via a roundabout coastal route to Bayeux. Coming up a slip-road off a dual carriageway at Isigny-sur-Mer I applied the back brake - nothing. I daren't stop there, so carried on to Grancamp-Maisy, where I found the brake mounting bracket had sheared. It is an aluminium casting and not repairable. I removed it altogether, with the help of an obliging but seriously inept local youth at a garage (proper mechanics must have been at lunch, I think), and arrived at Bayeux hot, hungry, very dirty and later than planned.
It was too hot, too crowded and I was too uncomfortable. The queue for the Bayeux tapestry was long, and the permitted parking time short. Reluctantly, I relinquished the idea - an excuse to go back another time - and rode on.
The coast approaching the River Orne becomes much more touristy, and I was glad to turn inland and find a site, on the edge of Ranville, where I could get cleaned up, go to a supermarket, have a meal - bread, camembert, tomatoes, pate, grapes: delicious - cool off, and enjoy a quiet walk by the Orne, which at that point is a ship canal serving the inland port of Caen and runs dead straight and flat for four miles.
I learned my lesson in Bayeux, and planned my second day with care. I went into Caen, splashed out on a street plan and sat in a bistro to study it over breakfast. There is too much to see in a day in any large city, and I can't stand them for long anyway, so I decided to make the one visit for which I had really included Caen in the itinerary: to the Church of St. Etienne.
There are a number of important churches in Caen, including those attached to the abbeys founded by William the Conquerer and his wife Matilda - his for men, hers for women. St. Etienne is the church attached to "his", and he is buried there. It is also the first to have an ambulatory, or walkway, all the way round the clerestory (the windows at the top of the walls). This idea was taken up by the Norman builders of English cathedrals such as Durham and Canterbury, but never caught on to the same extent in France. As a result, the building looks and feels much less French than the others I visited.
I had lunch back at camp, and decided to stay another night and make an excursion to Honfleur. I picked a route down minor roads a few miles inland, because there is development along that coast including a couple of large towns, and was rewarded by a ride through beautiful, leafy lanes and attractive, unspoilt villages. There was a fair amount of traffic, but it moved steadily at the speed limit, and who was in a hurry anyway?
Honfleur was a fishing port, and still is in part, but also a pleasure-craft centre - there are a lot of such ports on this coast - and a tourist attraction. Even when crowded it is quite beautiful, and I spent a fascinating afternoon amongst the boats, the bistros and the narrow mediaeval back streets.
I returned to Ranville by way of Pont L'Evêque - a pleasant village, stretched along a long straight street as so many are, but if the bishop's bridge is still there I failed to find it.
The following day I crossed Normandy inland to a site at Genêts, near Avranches, across the bay from Mont St Michel. I planned a backroad route (once through Caen - that street plan came in useful again) via Aunay and Vire, St Pois and Brecey. At Vire I abandoned my "eat local produce" policy and bought omlette and chips, eating off a formica table, with televised sport in the background. And you thought France was the home of elegance and chic?
Mont St Michel is incredible. I got there early, when it was merely busy, and left at the sardine stage, without waiting for the maggots-in-a-tin situation to develop - as it surely was going to. I had seen pictures, of course, but the actual sight of it is something else. Awe-inspiring, humbling. Even the jostling crowds and the touristy shops at the lower levels can't detract from the magnificence. The monastic church on the summit is, in fact, pretty high inside: but from below, aided by perspective and the way the soaring rock is carried seamlessly upwards by the building, it truly looks like a "sermon in stone", an "arrow pointing the way to heaven". And still today, undeterred by visitors from the modern world, the monks continue the timeless, thousand-year-old cycle of worship.
When I had recovered and had lunch, I set off north up the coast, riding along cliff-tops with splendid sea views of which, for a long way, Mont St Michel was still a feature. Eventually I turned inland to Coutances. This beautiful town was much quieter than those on the Channel coast, with unlimited free parking, and is built of a pinkish stone which glowed in the evening light. I was fortunate to visit the cathedral just as an organ recital was about to start, too. What a terrific day!
I was booked on an early-morning return ferry. I had to report at seven. This conflicted with the common rule on French sites that engines may not be started before seven thirty. So that evening I drove north to the Cap de la Hague, then visited every beach between there and Cherbourg. On one, I met a Dutchman, fortunately English-speaking, who was camping wild in his car; on another a London family who took me for a Frenchman and whose French was, in fact, even worse than mine; on yet another, a French fisherman, with rod firmly planted in the shingle so that he could talk to passers by. We agreed that Mrs. Thatcher, M. le Pen, youth unemployment and the closing of the Welsh mines were all "pas bon", and that the weather, the Normandy coast and countryside, camembert and cider were "très bon".
In Cherbourg, late in the evening, I ended as I began, with a barbecued kebab in a French stick. I sat on the quay until well past midnight, in the first drizzling rain of the trip, listening to the local youth making whoopee behind me - very noisy, but doing no-one any harm. Then a couple of them came past me, and one said something to me which I didn't catch. "Pardon?"
"You - visite la Normandie - you enjoy your holidays?"
"Very much - très bien", I said, impressed both by the courtesy and by his use of English.
It is often said that the English are bad at languages, and there is some truth in this. But on the other hand, the French youth grow up in a mixed culture. They listen to much of the same pop music as English kids - in English. They wear the same T-shirts, many in English. They use the same computers, and even if the interface is in French, the underlying structure, commands and technical language are in something derived from English. There are many modern English words in common use, whereas the French words in English have often changed their meaning or spelling or become archaic. French kids therefore have a much better chance of perceiving value in a foreign language.
The night waiting room at Cherbourg ferry terminal is a windowless box. It contained chairs, a man asleep on the floor in a sleeping bag who hadn't moved when I left (but he wasn't dead: he breathed), two young men dozing in chairs waiting for the Southampton ferry, earlier than mine; a young couple with a sleeping baby, a bottle of wine and a reservoir of extremely trivial small talk, and a girl from London who had arrived twelve hours previously expecting to be met and who was bored silly - very silly. In these unpreposessing surroundings, and on the ferry, I reflected on a holiday which, despite its few problems, will always be a memory to treasure.
Next time, Brittany? Or even get adventurous - Spain? Watch this space!
2nd September 1995