Ports of call, Part 2 - France

We disembarked at Le Verdon-sur-Mer (Medoc, France) and drove an hour and a half or so through wine country. Art and I don't drink, so I wasn't much interested in this field trip, but I'm glad we went. The ride was beautiful, with miles and miles of fields of ripening grapes.

Many years ago, I went to a winery in Napa, California as part of a road trip. We did some wine tasting (I drank back then) and I found a rose I really liked, which I bought for years. The wine cellar was like a basement. Today's wine cellar had a different look.

Our local guide commented that most of the wineries were family owned for multiple generations. The young woman in the photo above is the fourth generation in the family-owned winery. These days, one of the children will run the business, another will do the marketing, and another will be responsible for the crop. 

**********

Our next port of call was Saint Malo in France and a 90-minute bus ride to Mont Saint Michel. The photos I'd seen of the old fortress had always made the place look like an island.

But it turns out there's a tidal bore there, second largest in the world after the Bay of Fundy. In the space of a few hours, this monument temporarily becomes an island amid high tides. The tide was low during our visit.

Of the 11 people in our group not shown in this photo, eight were quarantined in their cabins and three had remained in Saint Malo to explore the town.

There's an abbey on the crest of the island and a village full of tourists and tourist shops on the lower levels. Art and I bought ice cream cones and then found stone benches set into the walls to people watch. It looked as busy as Disneyland. I've been told that if you find lodging for an overnight stay, it's really beautiful when the day trippers leave and the stars come out.

After our return to the ship for lunch, we had an option in the afternoon to explore Saint Malo. I wish I'd had enough energy to go out again. At the suggestion of the cruise program, Art and I were reading "All the Light We Cannot See," by Anthony Doerr, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The story is about a blind French girl (Marie-Laure) and a German boy (Werner) whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Part of the story takes place in Saint Malo, and the book details many of the streets and features there in describing how the blind teenager, Marie Laure, gets around. I would love to have found the house at #4 rue Vauborel.

**********

From the port at Cherbourg, France, a bus took our group to Omaha Beach, which was one of the five landing beaches on D-Day (June 6, 1944).  I expected this day to be a trip highlight for me. Our visits to My Lai in Vietnam in 2006, and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in 2015, had been similar memorable times. I grew up in a military family, but actual war hadn't been talked about much. These destinations, for me, are markers of horror, of what humans can do to each other, whether they are looked at as heroes or monsters. For some reason, I need to see these places.

And the American Cemetery. One of our group had an uncle buried here.

The Aegean Odyssey left Cherbourg for our final leg across the English Channel, to the port of Tilbury on the River Thames. It's London's major port. We disembarked the next morning, boarding a bus for Heathrow Airport and our travels home.