Day 9 of The Great Trip dawned bright, sunny and warm and off we went in our Renault 308 to Mont St Michel on the first leg of our Normandy trip. From the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance to Mont St Michel is a good 4 hour drive.
We took the slightly northern route that skirted past Rouen and Caen on towards Avranches. As we came off the country roads running through the flat lands of Normandy we (more…)
Yes, that’s the colour ( color, if American ) of spring and to prove it I’m going to show you a set of pictures with lovely hues of blue. First though, lets start with this one.
As you can see, not only are the arms of the bush a brilliant red, the jacket of the old lady sitting sunning herself is also red. But the recycle bin is blue, the garbage bin is grey and if you examine the (more…)
This is the concluding part of the Normandy sub-series within the Punjabi in Paris series. You can, of course, read Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 has more pictures and even, hold your breath for this one, shaky videos!!
We left Ste Mere Eglise after a late lunch / tea of fries, beer and Coke and drove out towards Omaha beach. Drove down the highway and came to the exit ramp that would take us to St Laurent sur Mer. However, even at this late stage of the day (more…)
This is where we left off at the end of the first part of the Normandy Notes 1:
We’d missed the morning’s parachute drop re-enactment after an exciting and exhausting drive in. I was thinking wistfully about the stained glass windows of the church in Ste Mere Eglise. One of our regular readers had read Normandy Notes 1 and had written in to say how sorry he was that we didn’t get to see the parachute drop. < You can read about that here >
As luck would have it, (more…)
So I’m back from Kolkata or Calcutta, as it used to be and will ever be for some, like me. It was a crowded trip, with remembrance services, weddings, school and college reunions interspersed with sporadic maintenance shopping. ( I’ll have to explain that some other day, that “maintenance” thing.) It was three years since my last visit, so naturally on my way there I’d wondered what changes I would see, other than the omnipresent blue and white paint I’d been warned about, which is, as you can see from the picture, true.
The short answer is: (more…)
The phone rang in the very early morning hours of Dec 17th, a Sunday. In the USA it was still Saturday, Dec 16th.
I rose from the warm bed and padded out into the cold hall to the phone. I heard the pips that foretold a transatlantic call, waited for my oldest brother’s voice telling me he was coming for a visit, but there was no voice, just a silence, a silence that seemed too long, before he came on.
“Oh, you’re there? Wait a minute”, he said.
A strange vibration went through me. Why would he call and say “wait a minute”?. There was another brief silence before my sister in law came on.
“You there? Wait. Talk to your brother”, she said.
My brain spun wildly through a list of unimaginable possibilities. Then he came on again. (more…)
Yes, I do realize that Normandy is not in Paris and so, technically and pedantically speaking, the Punjabi can’t be in Paris if he is in Normandy. You are quite right. Wrong, too. For it is entirely possible that he was in Paris when he wrote the Normandy Notes. In actual fact, he is writing this in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in the Canadian Prairies, far, far away from Paris and Normandy. So why, you ask, does he title it thus? (more…)
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/458304859
Due to the overwhelming response from the 4 readers who took time off to read this Tale of a Traumatic Travel Trip, The SloWord has been goaded into producing a Boxed Set. Which really means that (more…)
< There are some who have waited patiently for me to finish so they can start reading. For them, I say, tsk tsk, but here it is, the final installment of the series that started with Part 1 and then went from Part 2 to Part 3. It continued with Part 4 and ground on with Part 5. We then careened into Part 6 which saw some racing heartbeats, cooled by Part 7. >
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/95581815 The last day of my life dawned dull and grey. Someone had reached up and turned down the sun, or at least hung their shirt over it. The light was distinctly grey and thick cloud cover covered the sky. I sat in the coach heading for the airport, wild thoughts rushing through my head. There was a part of my brain developing a story, a part that had little men running around screaming at the top of their voice and another was repeating a mantra I had learned during my experimentation with (more…)
So there you have it folks!I was safe and sound, on the ground, repeating over and over “Thank god for terra firma, the more firmer, the less terror”.
What? You have no idea what I’m talking about, you say? Well, why not read Parts 1 – 6 first? I have very generously provided links at the top of this page. Go ahead and read them, I’ll wait.
Done?
So there you have it folks! I was safe and sound, on the ground, repeating over and over “Thank god for terra firma, the more firmer, the less terror”. Soon, however, I had to get myself off the nice soft bed and head out into the city to explore it’s streets, it’s sights, it’s sounds, it’s ups and downs for they weren’t a second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in. (more…)