Part 3: From the English Countryside, across the channel from London to Paris and then on to Normandy
July 10, 2011
Two English trains, one Eurostar train under the channel, one subway, and another train in France…
We left Henley and traveled back to London on Brit Rail, changing trains at Twyford, to Paddington Station. There, we hopped onto the underground to St. Pancras station to catch the Eurostar train to Paris.
For an American used to driving, I relished going from train, to subway to train. The journey from London to Paris on the Eurostar, the under the English Channel train, took two hours and 15 minutes, traveling at 186 miles per hour. Try doing that in a car! I didn’t even notice the time that we were under the channel–it went by fast and before we knew it we were looking out the train window at golden wheat fields and reading French road signs.
Once in Paris, we followed signs to the metro underground to connect to Gare St Lazare to catch the train to Normandy. My father spent four months during World War II in Normandy, and fifty years after the war, I found a French orphan Gilbert, who Dad tried to adopt and bring home to America in 1944.
I wrote about the experience of connecting with Gilbert in a story that appeared in Reader’s Digest, June 2009, called “Finding Gilbert”. Gilbert did become a part of my family, fifty years later, and we enjoyed the connection for fourteen years before he died in 2008.
This trip, Landon and I were traveling to Normandy to visit Gilbert’s widow Huguette for a few days. Read More→
After our refreshing stay at Chateau de Berne, we followed the winding road down toward the coast, past vineyards and pine trees, with dramatic views around every bend.
The distance from Saint Tropez to Sainte Maxime, on the other side of the bay, is short, but in summer can take an hour or more. In September, luckily, it was shorter than that, but when we spotted our hotel, 