Honfleur was an additional port stop. The ship raced across the Bay of Biscay to try and keep ahead of a storm. This meant timings were a little bit earlier and we were able to dock in the town of Honfleur for a day. This turned out to be a really pleasant addition to the cruise and a very nice place to end on.
It's a very pretty little port town with lots of interesting buildings - a lot of timber framed, timber fronted, and a variation of different stone and brick walls all making for a very higgledy piggledy jiggledy up and down skyline. Everywhere you looked there was an interesting building and even tucked away in little parks and up by the viewpoint they were some really pretty cute houses.
Even the shops were quite interesting there was, of course, the usual tourist souvenir type places and there were quite a lot of clothes shops but there were also a lot of art gallery and antique type shops. These were mainly closed because it's so out of season but the window displays were very enticing. An eclectic mix of goods on display. My favourite was a shop that had enormous ceramic ancient looking animals in the window. There was a ceramic pig and a huge ceramic pink flamingo all which looked very old. In the back of the shop there was a full size horse but of course it was shut so we couldn't get into our look I probably need to return....
Because we were so out of season the main art gallery and the Eugene Boudin art gallery we're both closed. There was a beautiful ancient wooden church in the market square. There was also food and drink market happening - we ween,t tempted by the oysters...
It was quite pleasant just to wander up and down the streets. We walked right up to the viewpoint which was up a very steep hill (I did moan all the way up) but the view was quite something so it was worth it.
There was a lovely chapel up at the view point - beautiful interior and outside abarrage of belks with made me jump out of my skin when they the quarter hour.We found a lovely little community park - tiny space but very thoughtfully laid out hidden at the back of some buildings... hidden from people but a lot of birds had found it and it was alive with bird song and a rushing stream. Lots on i teresting sculptures... A really quite a nice tranquil space in the middle of this quite busy town.
The boats on the water were very photogenic as were all the rusty metal bits are used for fishing - absolutely no idea how they are used but I do like photographing rusty bits of metal...
It only took a couple of hours to cover most of the town- loving the colours allover the town but the red with the green and blue and the additional roadwork equipment. Joyous.... so we got the shuttle bus back to the ship in time for lunch and then we had to spend the afternoon packing and trying to fit all the gin that we've bought in Gibraltar in our suitcases...
That's our Mediterranean cruise done and dusted. A very pleasant experience and we visitex some splendid places. 8 different countries in a month... I will upload a final post sometime in the next couple of days just put some more photographs up that aren't really relevant to anything else I've posted and then that's it for this time - more adventures to come in the new year
Oh, Honfleur looks lovely! We were only in dock a couple of days and could only venture out at night when it was dark so didn't get to do much exploring or fully appreciate how pretty the buildings are. Great photos.
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