Part 6 – 40th Anniversary Adventure

July 11, 2009

We were up by 6:00 as usual and had breakfast and checked out of the hotel by 8:00. Off to the nearby bank machine and our daily infusion of euros, then off to Rouen.

When doing my travel research I kept running into La Pont du Normandie or the Bridge of Normandy whenever I found something in the Honfleur area. It is a beautiful modern bridge and I wanted to go over it if I could. It was a simple matter to plan our route so that could happen. As the Seine approaches the sea, the river valley flattens out and widens and the Seine runs in a series of long slow loops. After crossing, we more or less made our way along the north bank.

Today’s drive was the most complex one I had planned for our entire trip. It was imperative that Karen be spot on with her navigating. So it was no help when just after our start her cheaters broke in two and she was forced to follow our course with only one lens of her glasses balanced precariously on her nose.

At that point I looked a ways ahead and thought, “oh no”. In front of us I saw a pack of bicyclists and I thought we must’ve landed ourselves smack dab in the middle of the Tour de France. Of course it hadn’t started yet so these guys must’ve been just a bunch of devotees. They did stay pretty well in their lane and to their credit they were going almost as fast as we were. However, the road was fairly narrow and twisty and it took quite a while for me to find a place where I could pass them, all 50 at once. I tried to get far enough ahead of them that they wouldn’t be a problem for me again, but it was increasingly difficult for Karen to tell where we were going with only half her glasses on.

We decided to pull over at the next small town to see if we could get another pair of cheaters in a pharmacy. The first place we tried didn’t have anything, but the second one had just what we were looking for. The sales clerk did not have one word of English though. But she rose to the occasion, pulling box after box of +2 diopter glasses out of the back room. She was really into it and seemed excited that Karen would have some new, cute frames to wear. Unfortunately, while we were in the store, the pack of bicyclists rolled past, but Karen was now set to do some serious navigating in her new €15 glasses. Karen: She helped me find a really cute pair- really getting into the fashion statement and oohing and ahhing in approval when I settled on the right ones. It was worth getting passed by the bikes.

A short distance on we turned off the main road at Yainville. Our destination was the Abbaye de Jumiege. In all the guidebooks I looked at they said this Romanesque ruin was one of the high points in this section of Normandy. It is old but as far as I could see it was not any more spectacular than any other medieval ruin. It is supposed to be lit up spectacularly at night but we were there in the morning so we couldn’t see that it was any big deal. The carved head is the capital of a column and the faint painting to the right of it is the only bit of the original painted decoration to have survived.

On the way back to the main road we noticed that the pesky pack of pedalists had stopped at a brasserie for a rest and a beer. Hooray, they wouldn’t be a problem for us anymore. Just down the main road is the town of Duclair whose claim to fame is that it has a car ferry across the Seine. I thought this would be a fun thing to do and since we were a little ahead of schedule, even if it took an hour, it would be worth it. There appeared to be a line forming, with just one vehicle at this point, so I pulled in behind him. I got out of the car and walked to the ferry master to find out if I was doing things properly. He spoke no English but indicated I was doing the right thing and when I signaled to ask them how much it cost, he said, “Gratuit” or free. Perfect. We had seen the ferry landing on the other bank just as we pulled up. In no time at all it was making its way back to our side of the river full of cars. When they had emptied out, they started loading us on. During the process I got out of the car and took some pictures and the one shown here is the only one I have that shows the car we rented. The picture in the last installment was copied from the internet.

We arrived at Château VascÅ“uil about 1:00. There was a nice young lady manning the ticket building. You could walk around in there and find a number of brochures of local attractions. She flattered me by saying she thought my French was pretty good and invited me to read a paragraph or two from one of the brochures. I’m sure she was getting a hoot out of this but she was a sweetheart and we had fun talking with her. We decided to have lunch before we started touring the place and they had a nice little café right on the grounds. It was next to a beautiful little waterfall and was landscaped with flowers. I had Capococcia Beef which was sliced paper thin with oil, basil, and fromage. Karen had quiche and we both had “les frites” or french fries.

The Château was beautifully landscaped and the gardens were used as a setting for many pieces of sculpture. There was a small stream running through the place with lots of flowers and meticulously trimmed hedges. We have been seeing these hedges all over France and this would be one of the last opportunities we had to take a picture of them.

The sculpture was why we came here of course. They had at least four sculptures by Salvador Dali. The house had been restored by the national trust or something and is now used for art displays. There was a show featuring very strange and disturbing paintings of angels when we were there.

We spent a little over two hours in the grounds then left to go to our car, waving to the ticket girl on the way out.

Later that afternoon

As soon as we got in the car Karen noticed that my suitcase and backpack were not in the backseat. We jumped out and looked in the trunk and Karen’s backpack and suitcase were not there either. Linda’s cell phone was also gone. I must’ve pushed the unlock button not the lock button when we got out of the car. They had stolen practically everything we owned and worst of all, my passport was gone too.

We had faithfully carried our passports in special pouches that we had around our waist everywhere during the vacation . The pouches were fairly hot and uncomfortable to wear, so today Karen decided to put her passport in her purse and I put mine in the front pocket of my pack. Wouldn’t you know this would be the day when things fell apart. Strangely, they had not touched any of the souvenirs that were neatly stacked in a pile on the left side of the trunk. They also did not take our map atlas, my trip papers, or most important, Karen’s little journal with all our memories recorded.

We went back to the gatehouse to see if the girl could help us. She called the nearest police station which was about 15 miles away. Speaking French, she could explain the situation way more clearly than we could have and she was also able to let us know what was going on in her almost perfect English. She pulled out one of the brochures and showed us which road to take to get to Lyons-la-Forêt where the gendarmerie was.

When we got there the gendarme, Marie Sohier, waved us in and asked us to wait a few minutes. She was dealing with some other small village problem at the time. That took about a half hour or 45 minutes to resolve then her time was ours. With the limited amount of each other’s language that we shared, sign language, and drawings, we got the theft report filled out over the next three hours. During that time there must’ve been a shift change because two male officers and another female officer showed up. The men went off on patrol and the other woman stayed around to help us resolve our problems. While we and Marie worked on the theft report, the other officer got on the Internet and made phone calls for us. One of the first things she did was to call our hotel in Rouen and tell them what happened and that we would be late. She also tried to find out whether the photocopy of my passport, my driver’s license, and a copy of the theft report would be enough to get me a boarding pass at the airport on Monday. And if we were traveling to France it would have, but it turned out it was not good enough to get us back into the good old USA.

I had Marie try a couple of things for me. One was to call our telephone number and see if the knuckleheads answered. They were smart enough to have turned off the phone, which is more than I had been able to do the whole time we were in France. She also called the US Embassy for me and handed it over so I could deal with them. There was no dealing with them of course because it was Saturday and they were closed for the weekend. Nothing could be done until Monday morning at nine o’clock back in Paris.

With official documents in hand we left the gendarmerie at about 7:30 and started off for Rouen. Later, we regretted that we had not taken a picture of the station or Marie, who at this point, we had spent more time with than any other person in France. She was very kind to us and did the best she could. We all knew that it would be a miracle if any of our possessions were found.

Karen: Yes, my beautiful silk scarf that made me feel so glamourous was gone. I thought some very dark thoughts about people who would be so mean to steal all our stfuff. The worst part was, since everyone in France is nice and slim, they had no use for our clothes or most of our other things. I lost some jewelry that meant a lot to me and other things that were just a nuisance. Overall, we took stock and realized that we had already had a marvelous, fantastic, romantic adventure and they couldn’t take any of that away. We had all of our beautiful pictures, my journal, our memories and two more days to enjoy.

It was only a short hop of about 15 miles to Rouen but the metro area has about 500,000 people so this was a pretty big city with complex traffic. We had a lot of trouble finding our hotel. Because of detours, we took two or three wrong turns and at one point found ourselves in a tunnel which went who knows where. We tried to turn around and did find our way back to the tunnel, but once on the other side of it again we did no better than the first time and ended up in it once again. The worst part of all this was that my atlas only covered the areas that we were supposed to be traveling in and once we got outside of that we had no clue where we were. Somehow or other we muddled through, routed up one tiny one-way street and down another. We finally got to the hotel at about 9:00 and abandoned our car in Parking Ramp P2 as we were told to do.

We ate a late supper in the bar, a mixed grill, which had some disgusting kind of kidney as part of it, but otherwise was various delicious cuts of pork, beef, and something else. I tried to call my cousin Susan who was going to meet us the next day. We had decided we would make final arrangements after she arrived in France and called me on our cell phone, which was now gone. With some difficulty I eventually did reach her and we got things sorted out. I asked her if I could borrow a small suitcase to put our few remaining belongings in for the trip home. Trying to make those calls through the switchboard and the phone in our room was a nightmare.

We fell into bed exhausted around 11:30. What a deal!