Day 11 - Millau to Normanday, FR

We woke up and had breakfast at 7:30 in the hotel lobby. They had an assortment of breads, jams, and fruits.

We were on the road by 8:20am. The scenery today was surprisingly good and much more mountainous than expected. Our highest elevation was just shy of 3200 feet.

We stopped for fuel and an early lunch around 11:00am. Our first tank of fuel had lasted us 757km (470 miles). We put 40 liters of diesel in at a cost of 65 Euros. That comes to about $7.20/gallon! Fuel is expensive here for sure. Our mileage came out to around 44mpg, which is impressive.

We shared a Cesar sandwich for lunch. The french bread is so  good here, we won’t be able to eat bread from a bag again. 

We had a very long stretch on a toll road today. At the pay gate, Rob put in the ticket and the amount was $30.5 Euros. So he put in our credit card that we have been using all trip long. The machine spit the card back out failing to read it. Rob put the card back in and the machine again spit it back out. Thinking he needed to place the card in a different orientation than what he had been using, Rob flipped the card over and put it back into the machine only to have the machine spit it back out again. This time however, the machine spit the card out along with the toll ticket. The ticket came flying out of the machine and on to the ground.

When pulling up to the toll machines, you need to be pretty close so you can reach the controls, tickets, etc. That also means you are too close to open your door to get out. 

So now we have a ticket that is on the ground and Rob can not open his door to retrieve it, not to mention the car behind us that is now having to back up because it is pretty obvious we are not going anywhere fast.

Rob moves the car around in the toll lane and backs to pull away from the machine so he can open his door and retrieve the ticket. By this time an attendant has come over to assist. First she has Rob redo the process of putting in the ticket and the credit card because as far as she knows, we are just dumb American tourists that can not figure out the system. When the card is rejected again, she reads out the card number to another attendant in the cashier booth thinking perhaps the reader just is not working for the card. Rob gets a head shake that the card is not going through. Fortunately, we have cash, so we place $35 Euros (the closest we had to exact change) in a box which gets sent to the main cashier who then says “Merci” and opens the gate. 

We are not sure what happened because every toll we used before then, the card worked fine. We thought maybe due to the high dollar value, the credit card company froze the card for suspicious activity. At this point Michele is trying to call the credit card company to check with them but her call does not want to go through because she can’t figure out how to dial out of the country.  

The GPS then instructs us to exit the road but the ramp is under construction so Rob starts following the detour signs which lead us onto another toll road. Uh oh. Will our card work? We slip the card into the machine and “Voila” it works with zero problems. Phew! So it must have been the machine at the toll booth and not our card.  

The detour signs mysteriously stopped so we restarted the GPS and it put us back on the path to LeMans. 

We made a quick stop at the front gate of the Bugatti Circuit in LeMans. We only messed up 2 of the 2 dozen traffic circles we went through.

We then pushed on for the final 200km to Arromanches, our destination for the day.

We arrived at our final destination at 6:45pm, Les Villas du Arromanches. Upon arriving Michele said, “Yes, this is my kind of place.” Our balcony is the one on the left. 

 Today’s drive covered 883km and took about 10.5 hrs. We saw a lot of  grapes on the vine in fields and a few other crops. Corn is only grown here for the livestock. 

We walked over to a restaurant in town and had a very nice meal that ended with a chocolate crepe.

Along the beaches we could see huge concrete piers. The U.S. pulled these across the English Channel during WWII and sank to create a quick port to provide a quick way to unload ships after the Normandy invasion. 

Arromanches was on the extreme western part of Gold Beach and did not see much fighting. Most of the town survived since it was not bombed in preparation of the invasion. 

Tomorrow we look forward to our day tour of the U.S. beaches and learning more about D-day.