This time last year, I went on a cruise with my siblings, 9 of us in total. We went to Hamburg in Germany, Bruges in Belgium and Brest and Le Harve in France. Brest was quite an uneventful day, and a challenge to make it into an interesting post. I'm still working on it. Today's post is about Le Harve.
This art installation by Le Harve port is one of the city's landmark and all tourists arriving by cruise will see it when they walk into town. If you visit Le Harve by any other means, you'll probably see it as well if you walk along the sea front.
Before we arrived at Le Harve, I was responsible for the day's itinerary. Of course I turned to my trusted Pinmapple to see where my fellow Hiver's have been and found a place called Etretat. It's about an hour's bus ride away from town and was perfect for the day. The problem was that there was only one bus an hour, and when the bus arrived, it was already full. It wasn't surprising to be honest as it was Sunday. Imagine a cruise with 3000 passengers arriving in a city, even if 5% of them had the same plan as us, that's 150 people. You'll need more than one bus an hour!
Whilst we were debating what to do next, we wandered around town. There wasn't much to do to kill six hours.
In the end we decided to walk over to the bus terminal and catch the next bus. We might end up with less time at Etretat but at least we'll have been there and done it. That's the joys of cruise travel 😄 There was a bit of a queue when we arrivedat the bus terminal but luckily we managed to get on the bus and even got a seat.
Etretat was very busy when we arrived. I'm glad we weren't driving as I saw lots of cars parked on both sides of the road that were quite far away from the centre. Apart from us and other cruise tourists (quite easy to recognise) there were also a lot of locals. The place was buzzing. We headed down to the beach, that's what Etratat is famous for - the chalk cliffs and the arches.
It was actually very nice to see these arches at Etratat, because back home in UK we also have a similar structure called the Durdle Door. Here's me hiking there some years ago. The arches at Etretat were a bit further away and we didn't have enough time to walk to that stretch of the beach. Viewing it from a distance was pretty impressive anyway.
Anyway, back to Etretat. The best view is from the cliff top. It's a little hike up, nothing that we can't handle. I can already imagine how gorgeous the views will be, and I spotted a church up there. Not that I was planning to go to Sunday church.
After a little huff and puff, we made it to the top. And boy, the views were a lot lot better than I imagined.
Here's the chapel I saw from the bottom of the cliff. It was locked and I don't know if it's still in use. It probably is as it's in very good condition. There's another structure behind the chapel. I didn't go to explore it, but I've since learnt it's a monument to commemorate two pilots who died in 1927 when they tried to fly non stop from Paris to New York.
We walked a bit further along the cliff, a lovely thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. I just wished I could have kept on walking for longer, I love cliff top walks. Sadly we were a bit pushed for time and had to make sure we got back to Le Harve in time so our cruise ship didn't leave without us.
On the way back down we saw a group of people come up carrying bits and pieces to set something up. I think it looks like a proposal setting. How sweet and romantic. I hope she said yes💓❤️
Till next time, bye!!!
