Honfleur and Portsmouth

Honfleur and Portsmouth

10/11
We awoke this morning in Le Havre, a huge, busy port. 
Le Havre as viewed from the ship







Our neighbors at the dock
























Our tour is in Honfleur, a medieval town nearby. Our guide was excellent. She gave us some history of Honfleur on the bus en route to Honfleur then took us on a tour of the beautiful town with it's incredibly well preserved medieval buildings. 


        
Erik Satie was born here




We had time on our own after the tour and Patty and I annoyed Dick and Ira enough with our shopping that they left us on our own. We had a great time checking out the shops and even tasted some Calvados which is a specialty of the Normandy region.  
Lots of Calvados
We were back on the ship for dinner and on our way to Portsmouth England where the time change gave us an extra hour to sleep.


 10/12
We woke in Portsmouth, England this AM with gray skies and lots of wind. 
The immigration authorities required that each of us present our passport and ship ID before disembarking the ship and despite what appeared to be a somewhat reasonable schedule for doing this, chaos ensued with lines all the way around the deck where this was scheduled to take place. Dick and I appeared at our appointed time, saw the lines and went to breakfast. We came back after breakfast and much later than our appointed time and arrived just in time to get through in something like 30 seconds. Patty and Ira and Barry and Sharon had stood in line for over an hour!
The chaos of the immigration issue was nearly matched by the chaos of getting on a bus for a tour of the Portsmouth dockyards but we ultimately arrived at the museum of the Mary Rose, the prize ship of Henry VIII that sank in the 1400's drowning almost 500 people. There were only 35 survivors. The ship was raised in the late 1980's and a museum built to tell the story and show the remains of the ship. 
The Mary Rose model

Me with King Henry VIII
The HMS Victory is also here, (Lord Nelson's ship) and has been restored for tours.
Lord Nelson
The Victory

 



Both were interesting but the weather with it's dark gray skies and extreme windiness kept us from wanting to explore anything else and we came back to the ship. Bad news awaited when we returned. The captain came on the loudspeaker to tell us that bad weather would force us to miss our next port of Falmouth where we would have had the opportunity to see the Cornwall coast. In fact, the weather was sooo bad that Falmouth had CLOSED the port. An unusual hurricane that formed in the Atlantic had moved toward the east, crossing over southern Ireland and approaching England. The result was that we would be spending the next two days at sea. A sea day had been scheduled following Falmouth but now it was two. In addition, the captain told us that rough seas, high winds and generally miserable conditions awaited us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amsterdam and Bruges

Image
  Amsterdam and Bruges 10/9 We woke in Amsterdam. We were scheduled for a canal cruise which involved arriving at the canal on a bus. The traffic was as bad as 101 on Fri afternoon and the guide was terrible. There was total chaos as we left the bus and boarded the canal boat. The cruise was pleasant but fairly unremarkable. We came back to the ship for lunch then walked back into town taking a longer than necessary route. It was a quite warm and sunny day. Barry wanted to buy some gin and on the way to the liquor store we passed a "hemp" store where I bought some CBD candy. On our way back we stopped for a beer at a small bar and sat outside enjoying watching the world. Random woman but just look at the bike parking lot! Sharon, the non beer drinker took the photo That evening we created a Keystone cops confusion around planning the next day's excursion. I had bought tickets for an 8 hr trip to Bruges and Ghent w...
Read more

Oslo to Bergen

Image
Oslo to Bergen 10/5 The group all went by train to Bergen. Josh and Paktis weren't in our car but the rest of us were together. The scenery was spectacular. As we went to the higher elevations, we were above the tree line and there was snow and ice everywhere with almost a whiteout in some areas. We saw beautiful waterfalls, rivers and forests.     Once in Bergen we had difficulty finding our hotel....directly across the street from the side of the station! The hotel was a very nice, rustic, Norwegian looking hotel. That evening we walked for a fair distance through Bergen to arrive at the wharf area where we ate at a gigantic fish market that had cases and cases of every imaginable type of seafood.   Wharf area    Our meal was terrific with the freshest of seafood. Patty and I both had mussels for appetizers, different preparations for each of us. One was a spicy broth, the other a more traditional wine broth but both delicious. We s...
Read more