Duke's Excellent Adventure!: The Walled City, Harbor Town, and Little Paris (St. Malo, Honfleur, and Deauville)

August 11-12, 2012
St. Malo, Honfleur, and Deauville

St. Malo is unlike many cities in the world because it is a fortified Island City. I can imagine that hundreds of years ago it would have been a city nearly impossible to take, and yet incredibly easy to seige. Just put a guard on the bridge. Silly French. Oh well. Unfortunately, the walls didn't help they city very much against the fire bombs of World War II, which sadly flattened most of this city. Our story does have a happy ending however. The German general responsible for the fire bombing of St. Malo felt so much remorse for his actions after the war that he spent the rest of his life and his money personally rebuilding the city himself, and today we have an amazing destination with no visible scars.

Wearing my Asturias shirt and standing on the land bridge to St Malo.

The entrances to the city are small so you have to be careful entering and exiting whether you're a pedestrian or a car.

Inside a church there, I found this altar made out of an artistic rendering of Cherubim. Here you can see the wings pointing toward each other like they did on the arc of the covenant, and you can see the head of a man, and the head of an eagle. If you were to walk around, you would see the head of the lion, and the head of an ox as well.

Cherubim Altar

Churches in France are rather fond of this type of circular stained glass design.

For my organ lover friends.

I made one full walk around the city to get a feel for it's size and it's ancient fortifications. I found this arrow slit, and if you look carefully, you can see my ship through it in the distance.

The French love John Travolta

Here's the street performer I passed by on my way out of the city.

Before heading back to the ship, I wanted to experience the part of mainland France across the land bridge to get a sense of what the local French life is like.

On my way to the local area, I passed by a dry dock, and I want to show you this because it's kind of fascinating. If you have to have work done on a ship, you need to take it to a place like this that will hold the ship in place and drain the water around it.

A dry dock.

I think the opening of the new Les Miserable movie opens in a dry dock. Yeah, it does! Here's the clip: Les Miserable Dry Dock.

Anyway, here is another one that I caught just as the lock was closing.

So, what was regular St. Malo like? Pretty nice and normal. I found a regular protestant church. And then I passed by a building with "Joan d'Arc" written on it, and that caught my attention. It turns out to be a local community club that is similar to a YMCA.

Normal Life

Église Réformée de France

And then I bought an Orchid for the ship!

Once back on the ship, I popped up to deck 11 (the crew only top deck) and took some pictures of where I had just been.

St. Malo

And this is looking the other direction towards the mainland.

This house is off to the right on the edge of the water on the mainland.

So, I had a new friend, my orchid. I would take it up sunbathing on deck 11 with me. It turns out that orchids are just about the hardest plant to keep alive, and that goes double if you live on an inside cabin in the middle of a ship. My thinking was that a potted plant would last longer than cut flowers. I didn't mind if it died. To me, bringing in a slow dying plant is better than the already dead ones. But, some girls on the ship thought I was kind of backwards for buying a plant to die. Oh well, to each his own.

The orchid is over way out in front of my feet in between someone's platform heals to stand against the wind.

The next day would take us to Honfleur, France where I would take a brief tour of the city before getting on a bus, and checking out the city of Deauville.

Honfleur was cute.

Oldest street in the city.

Good example of the building style.

Many of the houses had this wood/plaster thing going on. That's a style specific to this region.

It is very much a harbor town.

Services were going on. It was so nice to finally see a church being used as a church instead of a museum.

A working church!

And I took this picture simply because of the feeling I had when I saw this place. I know it's just a parking lot, but remember that cars and parking lots are not a regular part of my life anymore. And there was something about this particular spot that made me feel like I was back in South Orange County.

Feels like Orange County!

Anyway, the tour couldn't wait for my moment, so it was back on the bus and off to Deauville.

Deauville is affectionately considered to be the 21st district of Paris. Paris is not exactly nearby, you see, so this is basically a way of expressing how pretty and upscale Deauville is. Everything is pretty in Deauville.