I was woken by the rain at 6:30 a.m. Except that it wasn’t the rain; it was water drizzling into the room from the ceiling.

In a moment of veteran-like panic, I had a flashback to one year ago when a clogged water main broke and my upstairs neighbors failed to realize that their toilet was flushing into my WC. (When I up to tell them about it they said, “We don’t have a problem. See,” they showed me, “the toilet flushes just fine.”)

I now sat up in my moment of panic… and realized that I was in a hotel room. I was staying in a cozy little family-run hotel in a peaceable village near the D-Day Landing Beaches in Normandy. The water, I saw, was entering through the lintel above the bathroom door, undoubtedly from the shower of the traveler upstairs.

I checked to see that my bag, clothes, and shoes were safe and dry. They were, and so was the bed.

Some problems are actually better experienced when on the road than at home.

I nodded off to the sound of a slowing drizzle, another hour’s sleep before meeting with travelers to tell them war stories.

Several times each week someone asks me “When is the best time of year to visit France?”

I usually answer “Whenever you can make it.” But the real answer is June, those long days of spring-to-summer when Paris is at its most vibrant, when you can still get a seat in a café of a village square in Provence, when you can still get a last-minute hotel room in Biarritz, when the tennis at Roland Garros is on TV (or better yet when you’re actually attending matches), when Normandy celebrates D-Day and the Liberation, before the biking routes of the Loire Valley get crowded, before traffic along the Riviera comes to a complete stop, when the Burgundy vineyards are in flower…

In a word: NOW!

The Weatherman, March 3

I rarely go out for lunch in winter,
but today I joined a television weatherman
at a neighborhood restaurant that prides itself
in serving only the freshest of fresh food,
though it seemed a stretch for the waiter to call the scorpion fish fruity.

He recognized him, and I think the women at the next table did, too.
And afterwards someone stopped to say hello as we crossed the bridge.
What a beautiful day to be walking by the canal, she said.
It’s going to get cold again, he warned, maybe even snow next week.

I don’t have a TV to see him wave his hands before the map of France.
But I saw buds on the bush on my balcony today,
and the cat, too, noticed the morning sun on the kitchen table
finally reaching over the grey mansard across the street,
where the neighbors close their curtains a little later every day.

It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo that you can see by clicking here. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that he gave me first dibs to use it on France Revisited’s Photography Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

One more winter photographic note: Not being much of a photographer myself, I do occasionally get lucky, as in this winter homage to Claude Monet that I shot a year ago.

Henri and I kissed our host good-bye, told her it would be genial to see her again, and vousvoied her one last time regarding her gentillesse before leaving Dinard for the 4½-hour drive back to Paris.

We would be in Paris in about six, actually, because we stopped to visit the town of Dinan, a 20-minute drive from Dinard inland along the Rance River. Due to their proximity and the similarity of their names, no one who lives outside of Brittany can ever remember which is Dinard and which is Dinan. Dinard is the resort town along the coast; Dinan is the medieval town that’s inland. An easier way to remember is that Dinard is the place you go because your rich friends tell you to while Dinan is the place you go because your guidebook tells you to.

Henri and I had really been looking forward to going to Dinan, he because the ramparts of Dinan speak volumes about the efforts of the Duchy of Brittany to remain independent of the French Crown, I because I thought I could get an interesting article out of it.

The Blue Guide I had brought along calls it “one of the most beautiful towns in Brittany.” The dark stone towns of Brittany do indeed have a brutal beauty and a medieval timeliness. And Dinan’s old town is so well preserved, along with intact ramparts and a view of the Rance River, that it’s easy to understand why the guidebooks speak so highly of it. But Henri and I were both disappointed.

Henri wouldn’t say he was disappointed since failing to appreciate a town that was graced by a duke is bad for his self-esteem as it calls into question the very essence of his aspirations to live like one. But I could tell he wasn’t into the place because he only asked me once to take his picture, and in that picture, standing on a rampart overlooking the Rance (the view in this photo), his expression is as hard and cold as the very stone of those ramparts.

Perhaps it was the change of weather—after 48 hours of luxuriously clear skies the clouds of northwest France suddenly arrived. (Note the difference between the top photo and the others.) But it may actually have been the town itself at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in September.

The old streets themselves felt like a weekend winding down, with stale kouign-amans (carmelized milkbread cakes) and fars bretons (pudding cakes) in the bakery windows, the sidestreets empty, and people milling about the main streets in the hopes that the old stones would tell them something about their past or perhaps about the direction of their lives, but the stones had nothing to say but “go home.”

It’s times like this when you realize that your guidebook can only take you so far and that the rest is up to you.

Forty-eight hours may not sound like a lot of travel, but it was indeed time to go home. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us. Before leaving we stopped for a drink a café on a grand old square that’s now mostly a vast parking lot. Our table was near an equestrian statue of Bertrand du Guesclin, a 14th-century warrior and nobleman from Brittany. Henri tried to tell me about the man but either his heart wasn’t in it or he really didn’t know himself why the guy deserved a statue in Dinan.

In any case I took the wheel and steered us onto the highway and didn’t let go, except to get gas, until I dropped myself off in front of my door. Henri made a feeble attempt to have me drive him home and return the car myself in the morning, but it was too late for negotiations.

Post Script
Six weeks after we returned from our trip to Brittany Henri called to say that a speeding ticket had arrived in the mail. One of us had been driving 57 km (35 mi.) per hour in a 50 km (31 mi) per hour zone—that one of us being me. It had happened on our way to Brittany, near Fougères. I’d suspected at the time if I’d been flashed by the radar post but I hadn’t said anything because Henri was sleeping at the time, and rather than disturb his peace, as well as my own, while driving through one of those plane-tree bordered routes that make driving in the French countryside so pleasant and dangerous, I’d continued on.

I naturally told him that I would pay the ticket—90 euros, about $135, argh!—but Henri would have none of that. He insisted on paying half. He’d received the ticket as the one whose credit card and address we’d used in renting the car, which also meant that the was the one to get the points deduced from his license. I offered to plead guilty to the authorities so as to restore his points, but Henri declined, saying that ever since he got rid of his car last year he doesn’t drive much anyway.

Gotta hand it to Henri, the man knows proper etiquette.

On our way from Paris to Brittany Henri and I had talked a lot about what we should bring as a gift for the women who as putting us up for the weekend. We’d never met her. She was the neighbor of the friends who was having the party on Saturday and she had told them that she had extra room if any of the guests were reluctant to spring for a hotel. She didn’t actually say that last part but our friends immediately thought of me and Henri. We’d considered bringing chocolates, Champagne, or flowers as a house gift, finally deciding on flowers, but we arrived too late to buy them so we greeted her empty handed.

That wasn’t such a problem for me since I immediately complemented our host on her tchotchkes and her red Louis Vuitton handbag so as to reassure her that she was hosting a man of good taste. But for Henri, who is the kind of Frenchman for whom etiquette, grammar, and knowing all about Madame de Pompadour are all that is left to distinguish those you would accept in your home from those you would only accept in your bed, arriving empty handed was akin to slap in the face—his own, that is, for he immediately turned red. Our hostess then further displayed excellent etiquette by opening a bottle of Champagne to welcome us.

If there was one thing I’d learned about Henri after 24 hours on the road it was that you can tell him to pose anywhere and he’ll do it. So here is Henri on his bed in the cheery room we’d been given.

Henri and I had never spent the night in the same room, so I took the bed by the door in case it turned out that Henri snores or has other uncontrollable and unpleasant nighttime habits that would require me shifting to the couch in the living room. Turns out he refrained from doing any such thing that night. We both slept well.

Brittany is famous for its ever-changing weather, whereby you’re told to run outside as soon as the sun shines because it may not last long. So immediately upon waking up and eating the breakfast that our hostess had prepared for us (further embarrassing Henri for not having a brought a gift) we got in the car and drove off, planning to find a gift along the way.

Our good fortune with the weather is also the reason that we bypassed Saint-Malo. It was far too nice out to spend our time on and within the granite ramparts of that famous rebuilt town that was once made wealthy from the workings of privateers and merchant ship owners and once made rubble in August 1944 by the workings of war.

So we leap-frogged Saint-Malo proper and headed to its suburban the coast by way of the Lemoëlou Manor, which once belonged to Jacques Cartier (1491-1557).

Cartier, you may remember from history class (particularly if you’re Canadian), left from Saint-Malo in 1534 to find a northern route to Asia and instead discovered Canada, which he claimed in the name of King Francis I. I’m writing this on Columbus Day and am aware that it is politically incorrect to say that Europeans discovered the Americas since there were already people here, but all traveling, I think, can be considered as discovery—or rediscovery—no matter how many people have been there before, so let’s all take a break with the anti-discovery crusade.

Not that that thought made me particularly anxious to visit Jacques Cartier’s house, now a museum that reveals manor life in these parts in the 16th century. We couldn’t have visited even if we wanted to because they were closing for lunch shortly after 11am even though the sign out front says that they close for lunch at 11:30. Still, an employee let us enter into the courtyard to take the above picture before she closed the gate and drove off for a 3-hour lunch.

The manor is located less than a mile inland from Rothéneuf. We followed the signs to Rochers Sculptés to see rocks along the cliff that had been sculpted into 300 characters by a priest named Abbé Adolphe Fouré (1839-1910). At age 55 he had a stroke, which left him deaf and mute yet able to wield a pick and hammer. He then withdrew to this windy corner of Brittany (actually, all corners of Brittany are windy) and set about sculpting the rock over an area of 5000 square feet into characters inspired by local legend.

Henri and I nearly turned back when we discovered that we had to pay 3€ each to climb on the rocks when nearly the entire coast of Brittany is full of rocks to climb on for free. But I felt a sense of investigative duty to see it since we were right there, so I sported up the 6€ and off we traipsed on the rocks. And I’m glad we did because now I can tell you that it isn’t worth driving out of your way to visit the Rochers Sculptés, however, if you ever do come this way and there aren’t more than a few other cars in the lot you might was well fork over the few euros and behold the monk’s work and have a climb on the rocks—at your own risk of breaking an ankle or being blown off the cliff in the wind, I might add.

Afterwards we continued along the coast and stopped to admire some beautiful seascapes after that. Such as this:

and this

and this, where you’ll see why this is called the Emerald Coast.

We then drove to the Point de Grouin, which is the northeastern most point of the peninsula and in fact of all of Brittany considering that when you look out you see Normandy.

After parking our car, we couldn’t agree on which path to take out to the point. Henri wanted to take the high road out and I wanted to take the low road, which pretty much sums up the difference between us, and unwilling to fathom a compromise in which one of us would have to give in and the other one smirk, we separated, which was just as well because after a couple of hours with Henri a little break is always welcome.

I eventually found Henri back near the car (I had the keys). I could tell by the way he asked what had taken me so long that he had either missed me or had taken the less interesting path. When I asked him if he’d seen Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance he nodded “Mm” in such a way that I knew he was lying. Here’s Le Mont Saint Michel beyond the rocks:

We then stopped at Cancale. I’d been here briefly on a weekday in early June this year when there wasn’t a tourist in sight and found it a wonderfully charming little port town where I wish I’d been able to spend more than an hour. Now, on a sunny September weekend it was quite crowded, and even though I didn’t feel the need to stay for long I was very glad that I did have another hour here.

Cancale, which faces the bay of Le Mont Saint Michel and finally afforded Henri a distant glimpse of the Mount, is famous for its oysters, which enjoy the refreshing current of some of the strongest tides in the world. The Cancale is a firm, salty everyman’s oyster that makes its way onto tables throughout France, especially during the Christmas-New Year season.

To best appreciate Cancale oysters in Cancale you should go directly to the oystermongers at the northern end of the port and ask them to open up a dozen that you can then down (with a spritz of lemon) on the ledge with a view out to the oyster farms and, on a bright day, Le Mont Saint Michel in the distance.

Henri and I would have done just that if we’d known the stands were there before we took a seat in a creperie. No regrets, though. We enjoyed the crepes, which are also very much a part of Brittany. Henri was feeling particularly Breton by the time we left.

We were so happy with our little excursion that it wasn’t until we got back to the house in Dinard that we realized that we’d yet to get a thank-you gift for our hostess. We didn’t have time go back out though as we had a party to dress for.

One day you’re walking down your street on your way home, taking in a view that you’ve seen a thousand, no, ten thousand times, when a disturbing thing happens: there among the ever-so-familiar surroundings of sidewalks and buildings, streetlamps and awnings, shade, trunks, and leaves, something seems off.

It’s just a small detail, say a spiny husk fallen from the tree, but when you bend down for a closer look you realize that you never knew the tree in your street bore such fruit.

You pick it up—or rather I did—and discover that for the past ten years you—or rather I—haven’t been living on a street bordered by linden trees but by something else. Linden trees don’t bear fruit like this, and certainly not in late summer, and certainly not with a spiny husk that contains what turns out to be some kind of nut.

Ten years! How could I not have noticed? I thought something was strange when I stood on my balcony one late afternoon and watched the Asian family who occasionally, at about 5:30, just before the garbage truck arrives, go through the garbage cans along the sidewalk. They weren’t going through the garbage though but rather were gathering something beneath the trees. I had quickly forgotten (I took this photo a few days later), however something must have stuck. Later the same day, returning from the bakery, I noticed husks on the ground. There were lots of them, beneath all the trees.

How could I have missed them? And for ten years!

One moment you’re walking beneath your lindens—yes, your lindens—on your way to buy bread, and five minutes later, demi baguette in hand, you discover that you live on a street not with lindens but with some kind of nut-bearing trees.

Your life then feels like a fraud. Mine did, at least the part that is supposedly aware of its surroundings, the part that feels at home on a street with linden trees. But those aren’t lindens after all. The leaves, I saw upon looking up, though heart-shaped like a linden’s, were serrated, like a scary version of linden leaves. And those spiny husks (photo left) look like something from a horror movie! How could I never have noticed them before?

Earlier in the summer I was doing some research on the internet—that free-floating kind of research that I associated with the World Book encyclopedia when I was a kid, during which you forget what you were looking for but find along the way lots of details wish you could hold onto—and came across a man I have come to know as Monsieur Nature.

Mr. Nature knows all about the birds and the bees and the crops and the trees. I wrote to him and eventually enlisted him to lead me on some naturalist wanderings on the edge of the Paris region, particularly in a zone known as the Vexin Français. The Vexin Français is a regional natural park of villages and farmland north of the Seine on the edge of the Paris region, just before entering Normandy.

I’ll write more about the Vexin Français in a later blog. But I mention Mr. Nature now because in my disturbed state at discovering nuts on my lindens I sent him the following photo and asked him to identify the tree.

“Salut Gary!,” he responded. “You’re to be excused as an urbanite! Other than the flowering of the catkins that comes at a different season from that of lindens (and that should have set you on a different path héhé…)…”

I’ve translated the above line since his message was in French. For catkins he’d written chatons, which I had to look up in my French-English dictionary. After that I had to look up catkins in my Webster’s. It means “a spicate inflorescence,” which was no help at all.

Mr. Nature went on to tell me that my linden was in fact a noisetier de Byzance, corylus colurna, known in English as a Turkish filbert. He tried to reassure me that my ignorance was excusable by telling me that the leaves of the noisetier de Byzance resemble the linden’s and that both trees often have a pyramidal shape. He added that the Turkish filbert tolerates drought and chalky, alkaline soils, as well as pollution and wind, which made them good city plans. And he informed me that the nuts are edible, which explains the family harvesting them the other day. They are, in fact, hazelnuts.

Mr. Nature sent me to the following website: www.lesarbres.fr/fiche-byzance.php
Here’s one in English: plantfacts.osu.edu/descriptions/0246-332.html

Various websites, I’ve since found, note how the Turkish filbert “resembles a linden from a distance.” (Compare the linden to the right with the filbert at the top of this blog.) But I’ve been walking walk by the trees on my street every day, 2, 4, 6 times a day! And for ten years now!

Not knowing doesn’t bother me so much as not noticing. I had never noticed how serrated the leaves are. I had never even registered that spiky husks fall in late August or early September, let alone that there are hazelnuts inside.

From my window I thought for ten years that I’ve been watching linden leaves bud in April, that I’ve been watching linden leaves’ pale green turn a deep green, that I’ve been watching linden leaves blown by the wind, that I’ve been watching linden leaves turn yellow then brown and then fall. But I haven’t been watching that all, I’ve been watching filbert leaves!

Several times now I’ve gone out to the Vexin Français and other greenery with Mr. Nature and have been trying to remember the names of trees, particularly that in French birch is bouleau and beech is hêtre. But it won’t stick. It isn’t a vocabulary problem it’s a natural problem. Botanical names just don’t stay with me.

I’ve repeated those names a dozen times—birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… etc. I’ve stared at a single birch for a full three minutes thinking of nothing but bouleau. But still, show me a birch and I’m likely not even to remember that it is a birch, let alone un bouleau.

I know where the ambulatory/déambulatoire is in Notre-Dame, I remember that Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, and I’m pretty good at distinguishing a Pissarro from a Sisley, things that interest me only when I’m in a particularly cultured mood but that truly don’t matter to me.

But I am very attached to trees. In an uninformed way I’m drawn to them. I’m fascinated by the ways in which they, too, live and change and suffer and survive and adapt and blossom and stay serene. That must be why trees frequently appear on this blog. And I recognize that one of the wonderful things about Paris compared with, say, New York or Rome, is that wherever you go you’ll see a variety of trees: plane trees and horse chestnuts and lindens and, I now know, Turkish filberts—hazelnuts, if you like.

But I’m unlikely to remember their names. They just won’t stick in my non-botanical brain. Still, some kind of awareness remains, some kind of discovery, for having digested the disturbing fact that I no longer live on a street with lindens, I feel, as summer ends, a sense of renewal, as though I’ve moved to a new neighborhood, a new street, where hazelnuts grow, and where filbert leaves will soon be falling.

Flowing south from the edge of Paris to the town of Massy, a distance of 7.4 miles (12 km), there’s a bike and foot path called La Coulée Verte du Sud Parisien. You can pick it up in Paris just behind the Montparnasse Train Station. Enter through an archway leading off Place de Catalogne in the 14th arrondissement and enter the peaceable world of Paris’s southern suburbs.

The first mile or so of the path progresses with fits and starts as you wind your way outside of the city and into the immediate suburbs of Malakoff then Châtillon. Little by little the path then settles into an easy-going, occasionally rolling, unhurried green (verte) flow (coulée) passing through the relatively tranquil towns of Bagneux, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, Châtenay-Malabry, Antony, Verrières-le-Buisson, and into Massy.

Two-thirds along the way is the most well-known greenery to the immediately south of Paris, Parc des Sceaux, a delicious spot for an afternoon loll-about after a genteel ride out and before a satisfied ride home.

I pedaled in the company of Va-nu-pieds. Va-nu-pieds is the pseudonym—the lens name, if you will—of a French photographer whose unique work will soon be appearing on France Revisited. A va-nu-pieds, literally “goes barefoot,” is a vagabond, a tramp, a ragamuffin. Further explanations will come when Va-nu-pieds exclusive images begin appearing in this site.

Va-nu-pieds took his first series of photos for France Revisited yesterday afternoon while we wandered through the park. I took a few Skytree shots while there, some of which will also eventually appear on this site. We spoke of ways in which image describes place, but I’ll save that discussion for another time. (Actually, you can catch a glimpse of that by reading my preceding blog post.)

For now, though, allow me to take the tour-guide approach to tell you why, in the right weather—and yesterday certainly was—Parc de Sceaux is such a worthy destination for a traveler looking to enjoy some green time just outside of the city.

There’s also a chateau here, which one sees from the Coulée Verte.

Chateau de Sceaux, view from the Coulée Verte. Photo GLK.

 

One glimpse of it and you’re sure to want to approach for a closer view.

Chateaux de Sceaux, a closer view. Photo GLK

Entrance is free. You can walk your bikes through the park, but Va-nu-pieds would have none of that, so we attached them outside and spend a few hours wandering around.

The chateau was mostly constructed under the ownership of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance. It’s a photogenic place in a post-card kind of way, but the main attraction of Sceaux is the park, created by the grandfather of French landscape gardeners André Le Nôtre (1613-1700). Le Nôtre’s work at Versailles was already well underway by the time Colbert purchased Sceaux.  Hired by Colbert then by Colbert’s son the Marquis de Seignelay, Le Nôtre designed what remains one of the pleasing and accessible noble parks of the Paris region.

As with other noble parks in the region it had its 19th-century era of ruin but has since been lovingly restored

Its trademark features are its cascade,

Cascade, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

which includes these spouts,

The cascade, three of five mouths. Photo GLK.

its Grand Canal,

Grand Canal, Parc de Sceaux. Photo GLK.

and its perfectly aligned rows of populars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, lindens, and other trees whose names I never remember.

Picnickers between closing walls of shade. Dappled sculpture. Photos GLK.

The sculptures are less noteworthy, but I like the image above right.

It’s simply a delightful place for a stroll, a picnic, a lounge on the grass (actually allowed here!), photographic explorations, a jog, prolonged conversations, a nap, romance, and, as far as I’m concerned, a illicit pee in the woods. There are snack stands and cafés in the park.

Other than biking along the Coulée Verte, Parc de Sceaux is easily reachable from the center of Paris by suburban train. Take RER line B, direction Massy-Palaiseau, directly to the Parc de Sceaux stop, a 21-minute ride from Chatelet-Les Halles. The park is then a 3-minute walk from the station.

Click here to learn more about Parc de Sceaux in French.

Here’s a Google map indicating the path of the Coulée Verte. Zoom in to see Sceaux.

Today I was working on an article about the four famous Norman cheeses—Camembert de Normandie, Livarot, Neufchatel, and Pont-l’Eveque—and looking at notes I’d taken while cheese testing in the Normandy last fall when I remembered that I had some photos of a cheese picnic on that trip.

I was visiting the Landing Zone then with Tom and Cathy Fuller of Atlanta, Georgia. We stopped one afternoon for a picnic of the four cheeses and bread and water along a wall near Ravenoville, a few miles north of Utah Beach.

Actually, Utah Beach should have been closer to here but on D-Day the first waves of troops ended up landing about a mile south from the intended site. Despite the confusion that ensued, that was actually to the American’s advantage since German artillery pieces were positioned just a couple miles from our picnic wall.

The camping car in the photo was not ours. Imagine it’s been Photoshopped out of the image to have a sense of how desolate this part of Normandy can feel outside of summer. If you followed that coast about for about 35 miles you’d get to Cherbourg.

Here I am, same place, same cheese, same picnic. If you Photoshopped me out of the image you’d have a good sense of how desolate the beach is, even in summer. You can see how far out the tide goes, though this isn’t even low tide.

The first landing craft arrived at Utah Beach at 6:30 a.m., at low tide, on D-Day. The major German battery at Saint Martin de Vierville that would have posed great danger to landing operations at Utah had been destroyed by sunrise. The other German positions along the landing site were silenced or surrendered by 9 a.m.

Of the 20,000 Americans who landed that day 197 were killed in action and 60 missing, making this the least bloody of the five Landing Beaches. It was also the most successful in terms of reaching and maintaining the day’s objectives.

I mentioned in my last blog post that it’s unusual to have a four-day stretch of blue sky as appears in those photos. I wish such sunny weather on your own visit should you come to Normandy, but as a precaution it’s better to dress for the sky that’s in these two photos and for the wind that you can imagine in the photo of those picnickers with hair.

The black line you see just offshore are part of a mussel farm. Closer to Utah Beach there’s an oyster park. Utah Beach is actually well known for its oysters. In addition to its cheese Normandy is also a major producer of oysters. I’ll have to go back for an oyster picnic sometime. Anyone want to join me? To learn more (in French) about Norman oysters click here.

U.S. President Obama, French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Brown, and Canadian Prime Minister Harper visited the Landing Zone in Normandy on Saturday but I beat them to the punch, spending a few days there earlier in the week before the crowds arrived. The photo log below shows many (but not all) of the main D-Day sights and cemeteries that one can see over about three days if setting out from Paris.

In an article to appear next week on France Revisited I’ll be outlining a series of possible itineraries, but for now I invite you to join me on a portion of my own itinerary last week.

I lucked upon a string of sunny days, hence the blue skies in the photos, which is a rarity in Normandy, as anyone who has read about the events of June 1944 knows. Though my own trip also included a visit to Deauville and Honfleur before visiting the Landing Zone and Le Mont Saint Michel, Saint Malo, Le Mans, and Chartres afterwards, this photo log focuses on sights along and inland of the Landing Zone of June 6, 1944.

However, I can’t help but begin with images of Monet’s Garden and House at Giverny since it’s only a slight detour on the way to Normandy. In a sense, the day was too blue when I took the picture below left of Monet’s water lily pond since there was nothing in the sky to be reflected in the water as there often was in Monet’s work. The garden, below right, was in full bloom.

The road to Normandy from Paris more or less follows the Seine downstream towards the English Channel. After Giverny I backtracked upstream along the river to visit La Roche Guyon. I planned it that way because if visiting both it’s advisable to arrive early at Giverny. Furthermore, La Roche Guyon makes for a better lunch stop between the two.

La Roche Guyon naturally rings far fewer bells than Giverny, but it’s an interesting stop for a WWII tour because the chateau in the photo below left is where German Field Marshall Rommel set up his headquarters when he was appointed by Hitler to oversee and reinforce defenses along the Atlantic Wall. Many of the Landing sights that you’ll see in Normandy were personally inspected by Rommel from January to May 1944. The chateau of La Roche Guyon has a 1000-year history that I won’t go into here. The main marks from Rommel’s period are the casements where ammunition was kept, which now present an exhibit about that period. Otherwise, the chateau is a wonderful mishmash of periods with a beautiful view over the Seine. I typically think of Giverny as a pain for a daytrip on its own from Paris, but I do like the idea of a day combining Giverny with La Roche Guyon, though it’s necessary to have a car to do so or good biking legs from Vernon. La Roche Guyon is a pretty Seine-side town. The photo below right is a view upstream from the town.

Approaching the D-Day sights from the east, i.e. with the British and Canadian Landing Beaches, the first stop is Pegasus Bridge, which was rapidly taken by British airborne troops arriving in three gliders on the night of June 5-6, 1944. The bridge was taken in order to cut off German troops—and especially tanks—that might arrive from further east once the landing started and to prevent them from crossing the Orne River. The bridge that now goes over the Orne (below left) is a higher tech replica of the original bridge, which has been moved onto the grounds of the Pegasus Memorial Museum a few hundred yards away, which tells about the British airborne landing.

The Merville Battery was also captured by British airborne troops arriving by parachute and glider on the night of June 5-6, 1944. This was a major German battery between the coast and the right bank of the Orne whose guns were capable of firing on Sword Beach, the easternmost of the Landing Beaches. I won’t tell here the heroic and bloody story of how it was taken, but I will say that after reading about it and visiting the site several times before I was fortunate to hear first-hand last week when I met Alexander Taylor, who landed on a glider that night.

The Landing Zone is worth a visit at any time of year, but those who visit in the days surrounding June 6 may well encounter visiting some of the men who took part in the landing. During the 20 or times that I’ve visited the Landing Zone, beginning in 1992, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with visiting veterans on various occasions, but this is the first time I actually stood at the very spot where a man landed on D-Day and had him describe the event to me as he lived them. When I asked him his name also told me his dog tag number, 22543202. Here is Alexander Taylor, 22543202 standing tall at the Merville Battery, which he helped capture and render unusable at the age of 20.

I am sorry to say that I gave the Canadians short shift on this visit. Though I did stop at Juno Beach (where pit bulls and rottweilers are not allowed, I note in case you were planning on traveling with one), I didn’t visit the June Beach Center, Canada’s Second World War museum, which is by the beach at Courseulles-sur-Mer. Nor did I visit the Canadian Cemetery, which is a few miles inland at Riviers. Apologies to my Canadian readers. If anyone has a photo of the Canadian Cemetery I would like to post it here.

Arromanches is the town at the center of Gold Beach. It was here that the British built the artificial harbor known as a Mulberry. Some remnants of the harbor still remain just offshore. (The photo below, with clouds, was one that I took last year on June 6.) The D-Day Museum at Arromanches shows how the harbor was built and how it operated, along with other displays about the landing and the various nationalities that took part.

The only German battery along this coast with its canons still visible are those at Longues-sur-Mer. The photo below is one of four 155mm gun emplacements at Longues that were a danger to the landing of British troops at Gold Beach as they could fire up to 12 miles. Visiting the complex you’ll also see the position of its command center by the cliff and other concrete elements of the Atlantic Wall. Three of the four canons were put out of commission by naval fire within the first hour of the landing, but one was occasionally operational until about 5 p.m. The garrison here of 184 Germans surrendered to the British the following day.

Americans tend to visit only the American Cemetery but I think it’s important to visit those of other nationalities so as to have a sense not only of their loss and sacrifice but of their approach to their war dead. Here’s a section of the British Cemetery at Bayeux.

The American connection with Normandy begins with D-Day, but the British connection goes back much further, beginning with William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, who took the crown of England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. William is buried at the Abbaye aux Hommes (Men’s Abbey) at Caen.

The tapestry was made in about 1080 to be hung during Christmastime in the Cathedral of Bayeux. Inside the cathedral a plaque honors British troops who fought in the WWI.

In visiting the American sector, i.e. Utah and Omaha Beaches and related sights, I generally recommend starting out to Utah Beach, the westernmost beach, then visiting your way back towards Omaha rather than the other way around. On the way to Utah you might first stop, as I did, at the German Cemetery by the village of La Cambe. This cemetery contains the largest number of dead of all of the cemeteries in the region, over 21,000, including 207 unknown soldiers buried beneath the mound that dominates the cemetery.

I neglected to take any pictures at Utah Beach but here are pictures of the nearby village of Sainte-Mère-du-Mont, right, where men and women were playing soldier and parading around with their wartime jeeps. You’ll come across these collectors (I suppose that’s the word for them) at any time of year but especially around the anniversary of D-Day. Hundreds were gathering for the 65th anniversary this weekend. Few of them are American or British. I mostly heard French and Dutch last week.

I was in a little bar in Port-en-Bessin one evening when a jeep sporting a U.S. flag parked right out front. Out popped a big man with a long gray beard and a short plump women, both dressed in U.S. army uniforms, looking like Mr. and Mrs. Claus on a Bob Hope special. They entered the bar and the man demanded beer. That’s all he said, “Beer,” and he held one hand about 18 inches above the other to show that he wanted it big. The bartender asked where he was from. He said, “Czechoslovakia,” and he meant it.

The photo bottom right is of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the town taken by American airborne troops on the night of June 5-6 and securing the bridges and roads of the western edge of the Landing area. The parachute hanging from the steeple is a wink to paratrooper John Steele who got stuck there. The Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Eglise is quite good and has an excellent introductory film to both the overall landing operation and the specific events in and around Sainte-Mère-Eglise. 

The guns at Pointe du Hoc were a danger for the landing at the two American beaches, Utah and Omaha, and even though the Rangers who climbed the cliff discovered to their surprise that the guns had been moved inland and weren’t operational, the site is nevertheless one of the most dramatic of those in the Landing Zone. In addition to the drama of the events of June 6-8, 1944 that took place here as the Rangers took and held the battery, the site also reveals the construction and workings of the German battery complex and the extent to which it was bombed. The bomb craters here, unlike most craters elsewhere along the coast, have not been filled in. The top photo below shows the Pointe du Hoc and the cliff that the Rangers scaled. The bottom photo shows some of the bombed out landscape.

The American Cemetery is about 15 minutes east along the coast from Pointe du Hoc. The cemetery overlooks Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the five Landing Beaches. I’ll be writing about Omaha Beach, the cemetery, and all else that’s mentioned above in a separate article. For now I just point out the three images below: a view of the cemetery (top left), the memorial to American youth rising from the waves (right), and Omaha Beach (bottom left).

As noted above regarding Alexander Taylor, 22543202, encountering men and women somehow related to the events of the war—whether veterans, their children, Normans who lived through it or their children—is enormously enriching in exploring this zone. Below is a photo of Bernard Lebrec, whose apple farm produces the three main alcoholic beverages produced in the department of Calvados: cidre, pommeau, brandy. His farm, originally purchased prior to the war by his grandfather, is located in Englesqueville la Percèe, a village between Pointe du Hoc and the American Cemetery. You might stop in for a tasting, and if you do so be sure to inquire into the wartime history of the farm. As with many of the large farmhouses along the coast, that of Mr. Lebrec’s grandfather’s was requisitioned by the Germans during the war. Then, after the landing, it was occupied by the Americans. The American 147th Engineer Combat Battalion made it their headquarters and built an airstrip in the family’s apple orchard in the early days of the Invasion of Normandy. I photographed Mr. Lebrec below standing in front of the monument erected on his property in honor of the 147th.

So ends my photo log from the Landing Zone. More detailed articles will follow on France Revisited’s France/Northwest section this month.