Day One

Before leaving Rouen and heading off to Etretat I decided to have a look at Rouen. I rather enjoyed mainly the centre. I especially like the Church of St Joan of Arc. Unfortunately it was closed, and so, I couldn't have a look at the beautiful stained-glass from inside. It was a pity that the city had the classical French characteristic of every sidewalk, besides in the touristic centre, being paved with asphalt, which I find terribly ugly.

As Rouen sits on a valley I needed to cycle uphill to leave it, which was at the moment a daunting task as I was still not very used to riding with so much weight. It started okay enough but my navigation software decided to take me to a forest path that was so uphill I couldn't even push my bicycle up. After many attempts I needed to take my bags of the bicycle and do this little path a couple times to take everything up, fortunately this path led to an asphalted road.

The next 70km passed in a blur as it was rather easy cycling and I was feeling rather good and excited about the trip but the last 20km of the trip were rather exhausting, but still I was determined to reach etretat on that day and find a nice camping spot by the hills.

And after a lot of toiling I managed to arrive, not to Etretat but to Benouville which was close enough and had the beautiful white cliffs I wanted to see and camp in. After being advised to not go to a place by bicycle by a nice woman that filled up my water bottle I went there and set up camp in one of the coolest places that I camped in the whole trip.

As I was not so experienced in wild camping I felt uncomfortable when people passed by, but this slowly wore off, and I actually had a nice chat with some two guys that came to see the beautiful sunset.

Day Two

I didn´t manage to sleep very well, my body found it weird to sleep in a tent by a cliffside, which I can understand, but it was very annoying. My sleeping mat also decided to desinflate itself which added one extra concern to this trip. Regardless, I was excited to move on to Etretat.

It was easy downhill cycling until there which I enjoyed, and arriving there and seeing the white cliffs in all their glory was rather incredible. I wanted to stay there as long as possible but at the same time I needed to get going before the sun started to cremate me. So after hiking hurriedly to one of the cliffs I went to tackle the climb out of Etretat.

It was hard, harder than I expected, the lack of sleep and experience had already started getting to me. And although it was actually not that warm, that constant direct sun was really harsh for me. But with the goal of getting to La Havre and having lunch there I pushed onwards.

Just when I arrived in La Havre the battery of both my phone and powerbank died, navigation consumed way more juice than I expected. Either way I found a restaurant with not so pleasant staff and chilled there a little.

Feeling still very tired and having to charge my batteries, I went to a nearby public library and rested a little bit. Unfortunately the invention of air conditioning is still unknown to most public french spaces and this combined with great swaths of windows made for a great dry sauna inside. Together with my tiredness and the sun I had to endure resulted in a episode of mini heat stroke, or maybe just heat exhaustion, not really sure.

I spent a couple hours just outside the library, in a nice little fresh spot I managed to find drinking liters of water and regretting my life decisions, being now very aware how stupid of an idea it was to push on.

Eventually, after some two hours, I started feeling better and so I resumed my journey. Before La Havre I passed the Saint Joseph Church, a church in a style I would describe as brutalist which with its amazing interior full of colorful stained glass windows concentrated with the sternness of the concrete walls placed it solidly on the second most impressive church I visited, of course behind La Sagrada Familia cathedral.

I headed off La Havre in the direction of Honfleur passing La Havre’s huge seaport, which although not so pleasant to ride in it made for a needed change of scenery from the endless fields and suburbs.

While researching online for this route I heard that the normandy bridge, the bridge that crosses the Senne to reach Honfleur, is one of the most dangerous parts of the eurovelo network. Its part of a highway where many trucks, coming from the port, cruise by you at fast speeds. The intended bike path is actually just a berm with zero protection from the car traffic unless you count a white line as protection. I, of course, feeling not suicidal this day decided to take the pedestrian path, not much better, but at least it a small little curb and a little more distance to the cars.

I was part very lucky and unlucky for this crossing. I was worried about the possible strong wind, but actually encountered very little resistance from my pal Fūjin or even by buddy Notus. But, my bro Tláloc decided to take inspiration from non other than Judas himself and double-crossed me in the form of sudden downpour.

As almost never, I came prepared with a nice rain jacket and started tackling the bridge. It started fine, the speeding vehicles next to me were uncomfortable but fine. But at the halfway point it started to really get to me and the rain was getting more and more intense. Going down was really scary, and I was super glad when I was finally off the bridge.

And then I noticed I forgot to put my sleeping bag on a safe spot from the rain, which meant it was completely drenched, and also that I was almost for sure not camping tonight. With this in mind I reached Honfleur and took too long deciding on a restaurant, when I finally decided on a pizza place I started looking for a place to sleep. I was dismayed to see the cheapest one was 70 euros a night, way above what I was normally willing to pay. But my choices being that or a terrible cold night or sleep or that, I decided it was worth the cost.

The hotel looked like something that would be 30 euros a night but still it provided a rather good night of sleep that I desperately needed.

Day Three

Waking feeling refreshed, I went to explore Honfleur, which was a beautiful village for postcards but in reality was a car infested tourist hotspot that was not so pleasant to be in, although it had some beautiful buildings, but nothing to write home about.

Leaving Honfleur I passed by a garden that had statues of famous people, including Eric Satie, who was born there, and found a place where you could look and giant cool boats.

The two first days made me very aware of how monotonous Normandy is. Sure, it had its bangers, etretat and mount saint-michel, but in between those it was as insipid as it could. Non-stop monoculture fields and suburbs, very little trees or anything interesting in between those hotspots.

Considering this I decided to skip a good deal of Normandy by taking a train from Deauville to Avranches to then be able to the approach of Mount Saint Michel. Funnily enough the road to the train station was actually really pretty and enjoyable, with a lot of varied greenery. Despite it being quite a busy road with a lot of passing cars, most of them were quite respectful of me, so it ended up being quite enjoyable.

I took a train first to Caen where I decided to take a look at the city. I passed by a guy doing tricks on a bmx bike and we started chatting a little. He was originally from Caen but he also spoke a little of Portuguese (because he worked some time in Portugal) which was really cool. I asked him what I should visit in my limited amount of time and he pointed to some nice places.

After the rather long train journey to arrive at Avranches (as the train took a long roundabout way to get there) and was quite excited to get to Mount Saint-Michel. I had never been there before but from the photos it seemed really quite a fantastical one of a kind place. The path was very nice, being almost entirely comprised of bicycle paths going in the middle of sheep farms and the bay.

I think I never saw so many sheep in my life, they were flowing out of the gates of the farm like blood gushing out a wound. It was incredible at first, but got rather annoying when at one point I had to wait around ten minutes for them to pass to the bay.

Seeing Mount Saint-Michel getting bigger and bigger in the horizon was amazing, I was awe struck countless times. But it was getting dark and I was getting tired and worried about where I was going to camp.

When I finally got there it was 11pm and there was a lot of commotion by the entrance, there were policemen and firemen and I was very confused where the entrance was. It seemed it was high tide and the main entrance was flooded, and some group of scouts were washing themselves in the water. A firewoman came to try to say that I needed to move my bicycle, but the combination of my bad French and her bad English made it very hard to communicate. Eventually one of the scouts translated it to me and in addition showed me where another entrance was that was not flooded.

Very excited I entered the fortress. I have to admit, most of the magic of the place is on the exterior, inside it, although being still rather pretty and pleasant was way less novel. Eventually the scouts caught up to me, motivated by a song which one of the inhabitants found so annoying that he threw a bucket of cold water at them and I unfortunately got caught in the cross fire. Having not found a place to fill up my water bottle I asked the scouts, who were staying there to fill my bottles up, which they did gladly while I talked a little with some of them.

I decided that in the morning I would explore Mount Saint-Michel a little better but as it was already so late I decided to get back to my bicycle to find a place to sleep. I spotted earlier a gate to the bay/pasture of the sheep that seemed open so I headed there. It was actually a walking trail where I felt reasonably comfortable to camp. Although it was not so comfortable to set up camp in the darkness I fortunately managed a rather nice night of sleep.