A Round-trip Through France

A travel journal. It’s been almost a year since our Europe month, I thought a long-overdue blog post is in order.

A week into our month in the Netherlands (more on that here), we road-tripped through Northern France. We used a rental car, which gave us so much freedom throughout the trip. Jolande planned the wire-frame of our trip so well. It gave us room for spontaneous exploring, with a good idea of where we wanted to travel to on that day, and where we would be staying-over each day.

Our roadtrip started from Marco & Jolande’s Utrecht home (see the full post on their greatly inspiring home here), and on through Bruges, Belgium.

Disclaimer: I’ll add some words to navigate through the basics, but I’ll let the photos do the talking.

So, go make yourself a cup of tea, put on some mood-music (soundtrack to The Grand Budapest Hotel would be recommended), and enjoy.

First stop in France: Dunkirk. We could feel the “grandeur” and heaviness of history and the events that took place here.

AirBnB cottage on the prairie and working farm, Saint-Arnoult. The goats greeted us quite vocally on the way in. The little house felt like a doll’s house, and the farm something out of a storybook. Communication with our lovely host was limited to gestures and Google translate.

Rouen and surrounding villages.

The steeple of this quaint little French town’s cathedral quietly peeking through the trees, quite literally stopped us in our tracks on our way to Rouen. And this stop turned out to be one of my highlights from our trip. We went into the local butchery and bakery, and after much deliberation and pointing, we purchased a whole cooked chicken straight from the spit, and a freshly baked baguette (the first of many). These we enjoyed out of their wrapping next to the Seine river. We felt the limits of our language barrier from this point onwards, where English wasn’t a language spoken, especially in the countryside. The people we encountered were all over just so lovely.