nostalgic Normandy

Normandy became well-known to most Americans as the site of the world-famous Normandy Landing during World War II, which took place on Tuesday, June 6, 1944 (you can watch a fantastic production on the war, here: World War II in Colour). Widely known as D-Day, this was when the Allied invasion of Normandy also known as Operation Overlord took place, marking the turning point in the war as it would result in the liberation of France, Europe, and every other realm that was under Nazi rule. It was aptly code-named Operation Neptune, and remains the largest seaborne invasion in history to date.

Norman opinion of Americans still runs high, and the region has since risen like a phoenix from the ashes, gaining a reputation as a cultural and culinary hub of France. Perhaps having temporarily lost the right to their culture during that time – as well as suffering first-hand the horrors that Nazism brought the world – led this region with its lovely seaside cliffs, romantic gardens, and temperate climate to hold fast to its gifts of culture. Nowadays, Normandy offers inspiration to artists, writers, and chefs alike. Indeed, the region is home to 38 Michelin-starred chefs.

Have you ever wanted to fill out the branches of your family tree? Whether your motivation is learning about inheritable genetic traits or a simple talent for painting, researching your family history is always interesting. I can tell you candidly that if you have that one relative in your family who takes the reins on this (as I have with my cousin Marc), you are very lucky indeed. If you do not, now is the time to take the reins yourself.

There are two very reputable websites which can help you connect the dots with your ancestors and relatives:

• 23andMe: I have personal experience with this one as I signed up last holiday season when they ran a promotion, on the recommendation of a friend. You send in a spit sample (it’s really not that big a deal), and they send you back a genetic profile based on that sample. It was fairly in line with what I already knew, short of an exceptionally-large portion of Neanderthal DNA (which I’m obviously very proud of! No kidding.)
• Ancestry.com: I have NOT signed up yet for this one, which is a real shame because this is what my cousin Marc used to make many of our family connections (and then he made contact with us old fashioned way: email). If you give them permission, like 23andme, above, they will connect you with potential family members based on DNA similarities. Don’t get me started on how fascinating this is, but if you or your family members have any significant criminal background, know that it might help land you or them in the clink.

I introduced some of my extended, French family to you in my Paris with Kids post, but Normandy was where we were able to really bond with those relatives who had never left this region as my grandfather had. We were invited to my cousin Isabelle’s house for lunch, which she shares with her husband Daniel. 

We talked about personal and health histories. Favorite hobbies and foods. We even talked both politics and religion – and found we were strangely aligned. Communication was decent because Isabelle used to teach English, and I had minored in French in college… though I’ll be honest that minoring in a language will get you smoothly through the ordering process at a restaurant, but it won’t get you through a political discussion. We relied on her superior English for the most part.

Our kids ran off to play in the garden after lunch.

Our son was still sporting the hat my cousin Marc had given him, which he had brought from London.

This is a cherry tree which happened to have perfectly-ripe cherries on it. Isabelle had several of these trees. I couldn’t believe it! Cherries are my favorite fruit.

She collected a bunch for making jam, for eating raw, and to bake in a dessert. 

This is a cherry clafoutis.

And it was delicious! 

Next, we went to see my cousin Thierry and his wife Mireille. They live in an authentic Norman manor which dates back to 1100 CE. 

Do you see it through the trees? All of this property is their land. There are still secret passageways from thousands of years ago, when warring clans used to send notes by secret messenger. I used to do that in grade school, but I would use someone’s locker as my drop point and sign my name in an alias. Totally the same thing, really.

This is Mireille and Thierry, Isabelle, and me. Thierry and Isabelle have the same grandfather, Eugene. Eugene, Albert (my cousin Marc’s grandfather), and my grandfather Jacques were all brothers, born very close together. The trio were well-known in the region for many reasons, from being prolific (all three had lots of kids) to being colorful personalities.

Here is Thierry and Mireille in front of a smaller cottage on their property. That round thing in front of the cottage is a good old-fashioned bread/pizza oven! If they hadn’t told me that, I might’ve made up a story and said it was a dungeon.

This is us sitting around discussing genealogy, particularly my grandfather’s history and our great grandparents’ histories, and the marriages, divorces, and births of our ancestors. 

One tip I observed which definitely smoothed the edges and helped our kids readily accept our extended family: GIFTS! This clip below is so funny to me because it was filmed on June 23, 2018 – long before France even made the Round of 16 in the FIFA World Cup… and one of the gifts our relatives gave our son was a FRANCE 2018 World Cup soccer ball, and another was a French packet of Skittles in “blue, white, and red” (well actually “bleu, blanc et rouge”) – which was stated on the bag to be the “melange des champions” (“mix of champions.”)

Do you get it??? Skittles correctly predicted the winner of the World Cup! Sadly, the old man sarcastically chuckled as he said, “The French are gonna win the World Cup, so they picked their colors,” so he gets no credit for what would’ve been an amazing prediction. But Skittles does!

This is a better shot of Thierry’s Norman manor. The exterior doesn’t even hint at how stunning the interior is.

I feel like this photo is a metaphor for parenting: smiling, even while kicking fights are happening right behind your back.

Look at the door jambs. And how the interior (unfinished wood and green paint) find harmony with the natural foliage outside.

The spiral staircase leading several flights up is the stuff of interior design dreams.

Mireille is an educated art collector, and it shows. The stories behind the centuries-old paintings she has collected are as fascinating as our family histories. This is one of the gifts of original artwork that keeps on giving – the story of the artwork is like the story of a person, or a house. 

Their many guest rooms are stylish and eclectic, and just begging to be featured in a magazine with far greater readership than this blog!

Here I am hugging daughty and Pierre, Thierry’s father. He is 84, and still in possession of a raging head of hair and a quick wit.

Pierre spoke no English at all, but Thierry translated for him our relation to his uncle Jacques, my grandfather. He was intrigued because I am younger than his kids, but this is due to my grandfather having conceived my mother when he was advanced in age. “Second family” (or perhaps third, as some stories go) and all of that.

We returned that night to our hotel in Evreux, the Hotel de Normandie. It was super inexpensive which would make our next and more expensive hotel – Chateau Maillot – less expensive in combination.

You’ll see that I do that a lot when we travel: book a budget hotel here, then book a splurge there. It’s kind of a roller-coaster ride on the accommodation front, but it lets you splurge more sometimes than you might otherwise. I think a lot of people prefer more uniform accommodations during the entirety of their trip, and I get it. But I book hotels like I buy my clothes: I get some pieces at the thrift store or H&M, while going full-quality label and craftsmanship on other shoes, bags, and whathaveyou. Plus, this manner of travel keeps my kids’ expectations in check and make our splurges feel that much more exciting.

In addition to being run by a very entertaining and robust lady, this hotel had an incredible restaurant with an inspired menu and wine list. I couldn’t believe it!

We met Isabelle’s mother and father, Christiene and Jacques. Jacques is Pierre’s brother and another of Eugene’s children, named after his uncle, my grandfather Jacques. Here he is, naming off the rest of his siblings in their birth order:

It really is a fallacy that “all Europeans know English.” Surely many do, especially many Parisians… but many Parisians are not even French-born anymore. In fact Jacques and Christiene spoke almost no English and I had to mortify America again by speaking my Franglish when Isabelle was engaged in conversation and otherwise unable to translate for us.

Nonetheless, this evening managed to make loved ones out of these two, who I now consider “real” family because of our delightful three-and-a-half-hour dinner together.

The dishes were divine. I love a full fish on my plate for dinner – it reminds me of when I lived in Estonia for a summer and that’s how all fish was served.

The desserts were just as crazy good as you can possibly imagine. I was wearing a non-form-fitting dress for much of my journey through France because of les macarons et fraises comme ca:

Something I truly admire about the French is the notion of the hours-long meal. No server rushing you out with the bill or begging you to buy more. You just savor many courses slowly, along with the conversation, enjoying the culture of good food and better company. I just adored this night and really the entire day between this dinner and being at Isabelle’s and Thierry’s houses… it was magical.

The next day we toured the medieval town of Bayeux with Isabelle and Daniel. This town guards the famous tapestry depicting the events of the Norman Conquest of England (kind of a big deal, I know).

Would you hate me if I confessed to opting out of waiting in line to look at that tapestry? Because we did, without regret. However, I don’t want you to think that we scuttled history altogether – instead, we wandered around the town, trying to figure out what it even means to be Norman.

I mean, where does the term “Norman” come from, anyway? Turns out that the Normans are an ethnic group that arose in the Normandy region from intermarriage between indigenous Franks and Gallo-Romans, and Norse Viking settlers following a series of raids lead by a Viking leader known as Rollo (not the candy! But I wish) along the French coast, with Vikings from Denmark, Norway and Iceland. I think this is why my “23andMe” results came back with Scandinavian ancestry even though my own relatives have only related a French history to me (from the region of Normandy).

In exchange for the land in what is today known as Normandy, the Norsemen under Rollo provided protection against further Viking invasions. Consequently, they became known as the “Northmen” from which “Normandy” and “Normans” are derived.

Normans quickly adopted the indigenous culture as they became assimilated by the French, renouncing paganism and converting to Christianity. They even adopted the langue d’oïl of their new home (a language similar to French, Picard, and Walloon) and added features from their own Norse language, transforming it into the Norman language.

The town of Bayeux lies along the Aure River, and is quite lovely in the way that Bruges in Belgium is. It reminds me quite a bit of Bruges, although I’ll bet that Brugians (?) would be insulted by that comparison because Bruges is so much bigger than Bayeux, and Bruges is also still claiming to be “the Venice of the North” which I’m officially calling NOPE on since I’ve now been to Venice.

People don’t like comparisons unless you are comparing them to something that everyone in the universe would say is better (which is why I no longer tell someone if I think they have a famous doppelganger, unless that doppelganger is a supermodel, which let’s all face it: s/he isn’t), but I like comparisons of place because if you have an understanding of one of the two places being compared, then BOOM! You now have an understanding of the other. Kind of.

One time my professor told me I looked like Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I’m sure he didn’t mean is as an insult since he was a professed fan of the show, but I definitely did not take it as a compliment, and neither would you. So lesson learned: I now save my human comparisons for private gossip sessions.

There were a lot of strange offerings at Bayeux’s vintage-y shops. They would be fun to buy as a gag, but they were actually priced as though everyone in the entire world is clamoring for Snow White and the Seven Dwarves figurines. Plus, when you’re traveling, you start imagining the breaking that will happen from rough baggage handlers (you know you’ve seen the videos!) so I reduced my ceramics purchases drastically.

We eventually left Bayeux behind and visited the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, in Colleville-sur-Mer, just above the beaches stormed by the Allies on D-Day.

Huge maps of tile covering the walls and ceiling of the Memorial show the movement of Allied troops – British, American, and Canadian – from beach entry-points and inland. While we were studying this map, they played the US National Anthem. I’ll tell you, you must have a heart of stone if you can sit through that without crying.

The map, above, is located on the walls of the Memorial standing behind the water in this photo, below. It is incredibly moving.

Here is a photo of troops storming the beaches on D-Day:

And behind my children in the photo, below, are those same exact beaches. It’s not lost on me that my children are here because of the bravery of those troops that day. I mean “here” on this beach literally (as in, it could’ve still been a Nazi beach) and figuratively (as in, everything would be different now so I might not have even been conceived myself, let alone my children or their father).

Our kids have seen some war coverage, including of these tank barriers – which they couldn’t believe were this big in real life. On TV things can look a lot smaller than they are when you are standing right next to them.

But we did move closer to the coast the next couple of nights, and stayed at a delightful chateau: Chateau Maillot. This is our eldest daughter standing beside the Guest Book, which I would days-later leave a gushing note in.

Me outside the chateau not long after arrival. We were happy and a little exhausted. The funny thing about staying in a chateau is that you can’t just pull up to the office like you can with a hotel; you have to call the owner and arrange a time when they can receive you. And the owner of this chateau – a gentleman named Michel – spoke no English.

My Franglish over the phone is even worse than in person, believe it!

A pretty pano of daughty standing outside.

The amazing thing about Chateau Maillot is that, perhaps due to the fact that it is in a more rural part of Normandy, it is able to house approximately 67 miniature horses.

We immediately “clicked” with owner Michel, who will now forever be known to us as “Mich Mich” (at his request, pronounced “Meesh Meesh”). He is a very generous and entertaining soul, regaling us with stories about his formative years in Paris where he used to drink with now-President Macron. Do you believe him? ? ?

He also told us about all of his mini horses, lamenting the fact that his stud horse, named Moulin Rouge, has twelve females while he himself only has one wife. Hah!

After playing out in that enormous rear paddock, the girls went to the little front paddock to meet these mini horses.

My eldest daughter wound up electrocuting herself on this fence when she touched it!

When you visit the French countryside, you can really count on leaving behind the troubles of modern life. Especially if that modern life is well-protected by tort laws.

She suffered no lasting harm, but she talks about it, here. I’m only laughing because when she first told me the story, I didn’t believe her!:

Our breakfasts were extra enjoyable because there were no other guests in the chateau during our stay, and Mich Mich spent breakfasts telling us stories of his life.

He also showed us things, like how to open an egg with his newest gadget.

After breakfast, our daughty found an old discarded bird nest on the ground, with no inhabitants! You can tell it was from the tree right outside the large horse paddock, because there are long horse hairs making up much of the nest.

We left the chateau that following morning in a caravan with Isabelle and her sister, my other cousin, Corinne. We were set to explore the streets where our grandfathers were born and raised: Trouville-sur-Mer.

How had I never heard of Trouville before? Trouville-sur-Mer is the most beautiful, charming, lovely beach town I have ever been to! It’s all lovely Victorians and Norman manors, storefronts burgeoning with fresh mussels, baguettes falling out of wicker baskets, sweet-smelling candy shoppes, smart boutiques, and brightly-colored boats rocking gently on the water in the sunshine.

My elder cousins were enjoying being tourists in their own backyard. I know and love this feeling when I’m showing someone new how great San Diego is!

This is Corinne with our middle daughter. Traveling with kids can be tough, especially when one of them has special needs that make transitioning to new places a big question-mark on the planning front. But our kid likes who she likes, and thank goodness she really likes Isabelle and Corinne!  🙂 

OMG this is the lot of us outside the house where our grandfathers were born and raised. I love how you can barely see us or make out any details about the house itself, but here we are, happy to check it out! So nosy. I would’ve accepted an offer to go inside, if such an offer were made.

Okay, this is a better look at it! Very spartan from a design standpoint, but who knows: maybe our great grandma had cute window boxes out set up back in the day, or maybe the house was painted bright green or something. I’m guessing that with three mischievous kids, she had her hands full!

I took photos of other houses if I appreciated their design aesthetic. This one has a window box game that just won’t quit. The geese are a big plus!

There was no mistaking that were in a seaside town. I think the life ring is there just in case the water comes up really high one day. Then how smart is this person going to look? They might not be able to get out past the bars on the windows, but they can reach their arm up to grab that life ring to throw to you if you’re in a jam and need rescuing. 

Hold the phone: is this an attack cat we’re being warned about!?

Why yes it is. 

This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that we invaded the sanctity of someone’s home with our eyes and cameras because we were lured by the siren song of a house cat’s meow.

Next we found a candy shop. It was the candy shop to end all candy shops!

The options were simply overwhelming.

Each of our kids were like a … kid in a … (candy store) . . .

The elegance! If chocolate and sugar can be elegant instead of merely a “sweet treat,” then it is this candy since it’s being displayed under a glimmering chandelier made of either diamonds, crystals, or simple cut-glass.

These are flavored salts. What was I supposed to do? I wanted to pack all of it into burlap sacks and heave them onto the old man’s back to take home, but our luggage would never meet the weight requirements at the airport.

These chocolates were formed into the most perfect black mussel shapes. THIS I do regret: not shipping as many of these home as I could, no matter what the cost. Not only were they just darling-looking – they were actually the most delicious, silky chocolate I have ever tasted.

Oh well – what is life without yearning and regret? Only a life filled with happiness and peace – how boring.

Perhaps driven by the sight above, we did partake in one of the specialties of Trouville: delicious, sweet, local black mussels or moules.

We loved ordering pots full of them, and watching the girls break them open in a frenzy. 

We walked around this delightful little beach town some more…

Adding “honey and lemon crepe” to my list of favorite desserts, along with a cup of espresso.

We found shop cats to terrorize.

And reflected on the implication of this question. Yes.

We said Goodbye for Now to our lovely family, and headed back to play with the miniature horses and to test out the tennis court at Chateau Maillot.

This is me with middle daughty in the window of our room. 

Sometimes the peacefulness of the country can overtake your whole being.

Next the boys decided to play tennis on the clay court.

Arms-full of hydrangeas everywhere!

There were a couple of little horses in the stables who made their presence known.

We decided to go back out to see our favorite boy! This cute mini horse would follow us around and try to get us to roll around with him:

They can be so affectionate.

And also, mischievous! 

We brought home a picnic dinner to eat on the back patio, overlooking the horses.

Pate, quiche, baguette, wine, charcuterie, tomatoes and cherries. Perfect!

Then we went for a bike ride before sunset.

Who else dreams of owning a small farm like this? ? ?

Meanwhile, Mich Mich set our son to work as an apprentice shepherd. His job was to go around with Mich Mich in the Jeep and keep the mini horses back while Mich Mich put out their food. Otherwise, I guess they make an aggressive run on the food while it’s still in his arms (kind of like my cats when it’s Wet Food Time).

When it came time to say goodbye to Chateau Maillot and especially Mich Mich, I won’t deny that it was hard.

He and I both shed tears! And promised to keep in touch.

I thought it was really sweet how he took to the kids, and they took to him.

This is the kind of friendship that makes travel so wonderful. The memories stay with you for life, or at least until your brain doesn’t work so great anymore.

Thanks for looking, and happy traveling! Check back for our next stop in France: the Loire Valley. xoxo