France 2018: Le Havre – Cherbourg

Thus, the first stage of my journey, crossing the Atlantic, was over. I was all by myself now which was good and bad at the same time. Good because I was my own master, bad because I could only rely on myself. As it says in the previous post, I had a bus ticket to go to Caen where in the evening I was going to take the train to St. Malo via Pontorson.

The bus departure time was 2.30 pm. Other buses came and left, but they were not buses to Caen. My bus was probably late, I decided. After one hour of delay, I started to think ill of the company whose buses did not run on time. I asked at the ticket office and heard that the 2.30 pm bus ‘was canceled’.

‘How can they do that?’ I was annoyed and worried. The only planned leg of my journey did not go according to the plan. I returned to the schedule and studied it more closely. There were some letters next to the bus departure times. Since my French was limited to a few common words I needed help to understand those letters. A passenger told me that they meant the days of the week. Apparently, there was no 2.30 pm bus on Thursdays. So it was not ‘canceled’, it did not run! The cashier at the ticket office simply used a wrong word, hardly his fault – he did not have to speak foreign languages. Frustrated at myself that I did not figure out that and blamed the bus company, I went to the shopping mall nearby to eat and to kill time until the last bus to Caen that day at 5.35 pm.

The ride from Le Havre to Caen was almost 2 hours, not long and pleasant. The bus stopped at the railway station; I immediately went to check the train schedule that confirmed my fears. There were no late trains to Pontorson; I had to stay in Caen for the night.

‘Never mind,’ I told myself, ‘That’s the beauty of traveling with no preset itinerary and pre-booked hotels. Let’s look for a place to sleep.’

A neon sign of the chain hotel IBIS across from the station caught my eye. The location was good; I hoped to leave Caen early on the following morning and did not want to walk far. An idle group of teenage boys smoked by the hotel door. I ignored them and walked in. A single room was available; its design was contemporary and nice, the window overlooked the inner yard which promised a quiet night. There was just one thing wrong – the room was full of cigarette smoke. Darn it, I forgot that some hotels in Europe allow smoking in their rooms. Of course, I could go back to the reception and asked for a different room, but I did not want to look picky. I opened the window wide to air the room and went out to have dinner.

‘Surely by the time I am back the room will be fine. Besides, it is just for one night, no big deal.’ I thought. The air in the room was definitely better when I returned. The bed and pillows still smelled of cigarettes. Keeping the window open all night did not help. I hardly slept and made a mental note for myself in the future to check if the room is non-smoking.

Early in the morning, I left the room key at the unmanned reception and rushed to the station to catch the 7 am train to Pontorson. The electronic board showed trains departing to Paris and Cherbourg, and nowhere else. A ticket machine, however, could sell me a ticket to Pontorson. Confused, I turned to the information desk.

‘Don’t buy that ticket,’ told me a middle-aged mustached officer. ‘Thursday and Friday are the days of the rolling rail strike this week’. He consulted a printout with the actual schedule to confirm that there was no train to Pontorson.

‘Well, where can I go today?’

‘All running trains are on the departure board’.

So my choice was either Paris or Cherbourg. I did not want to go to Paris. I was in it 9 years ago, loved the city – everyone falls in love with Paris – but my goal was to see new places. So this left me with Cherbourg.

The city name was familiar to me. Everyone watched the classic French movie “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, a love story between a young woman who sold umbrellas (played by Catherine Deneuve) and a man who was drafted to serve in the Algerian war, and of course we all heard the beautiful film music written by Michel Legrand. The map showed that Cherbourg is on the sea coast. That was all my knowledge about Cherbourg when I bought a ticket for the 8 am train to it.

I had enough time to eat unappetizing cold salad in a plaster container. There were better choices for breakfast as I discovered later and too late.

Going to Cherbourg was totally an on the-spur-of-the-moment decision. I thought that after spending half a day there I would continue from it somehow to St. Malo. In Cherbourg, a quick look at the departure revealed that trains only ran to Paris. ‘That’s all right,’ I consoled myself, ‘Perhaps there will be other trains in the afternoon’ and went to explore the city with the backpack on my back. Since I was not going to check into a hotel I had nowhere to leave it.

After a bad breakfast, I needed a good lunch. Soon, I found a nice place with great food and Wi-Fi where I could sit down, relax, eat unhurriedly, and work for a while. From there, I went to the marina. A thick forest of yacht masts extended from the seafront to the horizon. I never saw so many yachts in the one place tightly packed next to each other. There were hundreds or maybe thousands of yachts at this marina. The sea breeze was refreshing and the walk despite the backpack was enjoyable. From the marina, I went to a small factory called Le Véritable Cherbourg.

Jean-Pierre Yvon was 12 in 1963 when the famous movie was being shot on the streets of his native Cherbourg. Years later in 1983, it occurred to him that if there was a movie about Cherbourg umbrellas then there should be the product. He personally designed three models and started manufacturing them. To these days, all umbrellas are hand-made. A video and a small exposition explain all intricacies of making these exquisite umbrellas priced from 150 to 500 euros (about $580). The factory consists of a single room. Visitors are allowed to watch the manufacturing process through large windows of the gift shop.

I returned to the railway station by 4 pm to learn what I suspected from the morning – no trains other than to Paris. I could have asked at information on arrival in Cherbourg about the afternoon trains and would have known right away that it was not possible to go anywhere but Paris that day. It was another blunder on my part – nothing serious, just disappointing. Words from the song Moscow – Odessa by Vysotsky “Париж открыт, но мне туда не надо!” (Paris is open but I do not need to go there) came to mind.

By then, it was morning in Colorado and I could call my husband to tell him my whereabouts.

‘Why are you in Cherbourg? It is in the opposite direction. That’s of course if you still want to go to St. Malo.’

On the following day, Saturday the train schedule would be back to normal. I could, at last, take the train to Pontorson, but now after two failed attempts, it felt wrong. It would take me way too far south from the other French cities that I wanted to visit and, reluctantly, I admitted to my husband that I was giving up my dream to see the unique abbey on the island.

‘So, what are you going to do?’ he asked.

I said that I would stay in Cherbourg for one night and then travel to Rouen. This would require me to return to Caen first. My husband fumed a little about me being irrational and offered to help with hotels in Cherbourg since he was at the computer anyway. He found me two hotels near the train station. The first hotel had no vacancies. At the other hotel, The Ambassador  I was offered a beautifully renovated, non-smoking single room on the top floor.

For the rest of the day, I wandered around the city affected by its unpretentious charm. There was not really much to see in Cherbourg. I cannot explain what made me like it, but I did not want to leave. I toyed with the idea to stay longer. Why not sit in a café on the waterfront and keep writing? I can always keep myself occupied anywhere and anytime. Then I thought of other places that waited for me. They could be wonderful too and, although nothing forced me to hurry, living for days in one city was not my original plan.

After a sleepless night in Caen, I had a good rest in my comfortable room at The Ambassador. I again pondered the question to stay or to leave. The option to stay looked so attractive that for a moment I seriously considered it, but no, I better get going. With a sigh, I packed my stuff and walked to the station to take the train to Rouen. Good-bye, Cherbourg!