awash with success.......

Flushed with success at the internet café, a place where I, very wisely let her get her posts out first so she could tell everyone how technically literate she is as opposed to me….

Off we went on adventure bent.

Now, one of the features of this time in France has been the need to collect a child from Calais. Calais for us in Brittany serves to illustrate the huge size of France relative to our tiny little country the UK. A run up to Calais would be easily a 1000 Km round trip.

A first look at the problem and the option of doing the run in a day was quickly dismissed. 1000Km in the van would be hard, 1000 Km in the van with the kids would be a recipe for riots…

A fall back plan was formulated. We would travel to Normandy so she and the other childer could see the sites of the 1944 landings and I would do the run heroic and shoot up to Calais and back in a day.

This all worked out rather well. An emplacement taken on the municipal in Arromanches, tent set up and a semi comfortable nights sleep.

Next day bright and early off I set for Calais to meet the coach at 4 pm at the tunnel. Naturally the first text I got suggested an arrival time closer to 1 and the loud pedal had to be pushed that little bit further down. Though of course licence losing speeds cannot be deployed as they time your progress along the “peage”. It is here that a contrast emerges; progress across Britain is rarely easy, rarely smooth and mostly tiring.

France has far superior roads, far lower traffic density and progress was easy. That said, if the attitude of drivers in Brittany is a bit erh “decisive” and “assertive”. Definitely “mirror, signal and get on with it” nearer Calais it was more a case of “mirror, signal, prepare to ram”.

I like the French style of driving; no one dithers but just gets on with it, though if you told me that their fatality rate was far higher than ours I would not be inclined to argue.

Certainly, when you approach a point where traffic merges, in the UK you will see lines of cars seamlessly slipping from two lanes to one. The equivalent in France will be more like watching a game of “chicken”; feature webs of black skid smears, serious bends in the crash barrier and a road paved with broken plastic and exterior trim.

Bethan, volunteered as ace navigator, and I made good steady progress and crossed the Pont de Normandy. I wonder what they were on when they designed that? High is certainly a phrase that sticks in the mind, a pair of roller coaster, sweeping bridges where the video was enough to silence management. When she saw there was both a walkway and a cycle track her nerve went completly…..

Definitely a way to take her at some stage in the future then!

But anyway the trip to Calais was fairly straight forward, Calais being signposted from several hundred miles out. The trip back was less simple.

Le Havre not being thought worthy of mention on the major sign posts, never mind Caen, Bayeaux or Arromanches!

This in turn made me think there might be something in this genetics thing. Bethan demonstrating she shares her mothers extraordinary map reading talents. At one stage she assured me we were actually 100 miles away from where the map said we were and that any discrepancies were down to the map being wrong!

Even the failure of the Pont de Normandy to re appear at the required moment was nothing to do with her; it was something to do with faulty geography…..

But I digress; we got back to camp to find management pretending that she had endured a really fraught day, whist we had of course been off on a jolly.

Saying that maybe we could have stayed home, let her do the driving, “by the way here’s the video”. Did at least produce a momentary silence…..

Silence if the only word to describe next day, with Taliesin as our guide a few of us went off to see Arromanches, 50 years may have passed and many of that generation with it. Nothing though can really prepare you for the beach and Mulberry Harbour.

The scale of it all defies belief. With the disaster that was Dieppe fresh in the memory, as early as 1942 the Allies had decided that capturing a Chanel Port would be a suicidal enterprise. Churchill simply decreed that a prefabricated harbour be built in Britain and towed into position off the Normandy coast. The result was an enclosed area larger than 1000 football pitches. For 100 days this brought in most of the stores troops and vehicles the allies needed to maintain their tenuous toe hold in Europe.

There were of course moments of comedy, the superb models of the mulberry harbour are somewhat marred by the depiction of lots of 1950 vintage Bedford RL trucks being loaded on the wharfs in 1944, only a decade out!

It’s being there that makes you realise how desperate the action really was. The decision to standardise on the Sherman tank came so close to costing the allies everything. Seriously outnumbered the Wermacht had little problem holding the Allies back with vastly superior armour. How many lives were lost because of the useless under armed and under armoured “Tommy cooker” as the Germans called them

As if proof were needed that we are a seriously argumentative species, we abandoned the coast and made for Bayeux and its bit of sewing….

Another war museum, lunch and home we came. Of course, she is her daughter’s mother and she who said leave the GPS off soon got us completely lost off the Rennes ring road thanks to the map of course being completely wrong again.

There were a few moments where the GPS too was making no sense at all, well so she said, and then at last we were on the right road and heading for home

Everyone was in bed by 10. Surprisingly it was 10 am when we awoke.