HONFLEUR, DAYS ONE AND TWO.

Honfleur is a beautiful town with its art galleries, delicatessen shops and harbour full of boats.

It’s not so great on a roasting hot day when it’s rammed with visitors.

On day one of our three day holiday (four nights in a gîte) we headed into town completely forgetting that it was a French bank holiday (14th July).  We queued briefly for a non existent parking spot, thought better of it and turned around.   The whole of Paris and Rouen had clearly gone to the coast for the day.  The French do love a day by the seaside.

On the way back to the gîte we stopped at an American burger joint style of restaurant for lunch instead.  The starter was good (onion tart) but the main course (chicken caesar salad) not so good due to the tough and chewy bits of chicken.  The pichet of rosé was rather sour and the ice cream liegeois desserts (café for him, chocolate for me) didn’t tickle our tastebuds the way we had hoped.  The bill was over €80.  Oh well, you expect to pay a bit extra when you’re on holiday, we thought.

On day two of our three-daybreak we went back to Honfleur for a second attempt and were pleased to find a parking space straight away.  Knowing it would be hot and busy we left Hugo in the gîte with the back door to the enclosed garden open, thinking that having had a good walk early morning he could settle down with the ability to go outside if he needed to.

First impressions were good,  a delicious coffee in a café near the harbour was sensibly priced.  After that we had a wander around the delightful streets then explored the harbour for a restaurant for lunch.  We settled on one where we could enjoy the view of the boats under a shady canopy and placed our order.  

A pichet of ordinary (but at least drinkable) rosé was outrageously priced but we thought “what the heck, we’re on holiday”.  The starter we both ordered, oeufs en cocotte with Pont Leveque cheese could have been great if it hadn’t been overcooked.  It was impossible to dip the toast into the eggs because they were rock solid but still, it was tasty.

That’s the point at which things went seriously downhill.

I checked my phone and spotted a message from the gîte owner to say that Hugo had been “crying” since we left that morning.  That meant he was howling.  She was around every morning doing the cleaning and changeovers for the three separate gîtes on the plot.

It was too late to cancel our main course so we wolfed it down as fast as possible.  I had ordered fish and chips, Nick moules à la crème.  My fish turned out to be a dry, tasteless portion of supermarket battered fish with a pile of greasy, limp chips and a small spoonful of tartare sauce that looked like it came from a jar. So much for the restaurant’s claim that everything was “fait maison”.  Nick’s moules were lacking in herbs and garlic, slathered in cream that was grey.  Total bill €85.  It was probably, all in all, the worst meal for that amount of money we have ever had in France.  Plus €12 car parking.

We rushed back to the gîte, which was less than a ten minute drive away and parked at the bottom of the drive.  We thought that as soon as he heard the car, Hugo would stop howling so I crept towards the door to have a listen.  The poor dog was howling at the top of his lungs, that penetrating, wolf like piercing howl that a dogs do so well.  We were mortified.

We went on a drive around the area, taking him with us.  We explored the lovely little towns and villages, with their timber framed, thatch roofed cottages and the very grand big houses presumably the homes of the more well heeled.  It definitely is a lovely part of France.

We have not fallen out with Honfleur and will be back!

Later in the evening, back at the gîte, Nick cooked us a delicious meal of bolognaise style beef with vegetables, total cost probably about €15 maximum including a nice bottle of Montagne St Emilion.  We played Scrabble (I won) and decided we would definitely come back to Honfleur but more out of season next time.  That way we could explore the streets more comfortably, we could bring Hugo with us, and we would not be seduced by the promise of a lunch overlooking the harbour into paying tourist prices for a pretty grim meal.