Bayeux, July 9

Sunday, July 9
Bayeux, France

We got up early today to pack and Uber over to a hotel on southeast side of Paris to meet up with our VBT cycling group. More... We have 5 couples in our group and one family of four (with two young adult boys), for a total of 14 riders. We piled into two private buses for the 3½ hour ride to Bayeux, a town on the Aure River in the Normandy region of northwestern France, 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the English Channel coast. Here, we met our VBT tour directors for the trip: Sophie (French, from Brittany) and Adel (a British girl who says she has now lived in France longer than in her own country).

The first thing we noticed about the town was all of the American flags displayed, along with those of Britain, Canada, and France. Adel told us that this is very common in the area, in gratitude for what they call “The Liberation.” The beaches of the Normandy region, of course, are where the Allied forces landed on D-Day to begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation in World War II.

Bayeux (pronounced “by-you”) was the first French town to be liberated after D-Day, and was proclaimed as the capital of Free France by Charles de Gaulle after his return to his native country. The town was not bombed by either side during the war. According to legend, this was because the local bishop appealed to both sides to preserve the town’s cathedral, built around 1077. It was probably also because the Allies were too busy trying to take Caen from the Germans.

Bayeux is also the home of the Bayeux Tapestry, a medieval hand-embroidered cloth that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

After finding our way around the town, we checked into our local hotel, Le Lion d’Or or “The Golden Lion” (for some reason on these trips, Gary and I always seem to end up on the top floor of old hotels with no elevators). We changed into cycling gear and met our group in the parking lot for a safety and bike-fitting session. Then we headed out for a short (about 7½ mile) warm-up ride into the Norman countryside.

This is the first year VBT has used GPS-generated route notes, which we had downloaded onto our smart phones beforehand. It was so much more convenient to have turn-by-turn voice navigation. On our cycling trip in Tuscany a couple of years ago, we had to keep glancing down at paper notes attached to the handlebars while we were trying to ride at the same time.

Back at the hotel, we all met in the dining room for a three-course group dinner. We were able to choose which items we wanted for each course at this meal. I had savory pork-stuffed pastry; pheasant with gravy, mushrooms, and polenta; and chocolate ladyfingers with raspberry mousse. There’s no such thing as a bad meal in France!

After dinner, Gary and I tried to walk off some of the calories with a stroll on the riverwalk, then stopped for a nightcap at the Irish bar next to our hotel, which had the very un-Irish name of La Gitane or Gypsy. (Every tourist country in the world now has an “Irish bar”). Here we tried a glass of the local specialty – Calvados, an apple brandy made from the famous Normandy cider – before turning in for the night.