Friday, March 18, 2011

Towns and Villages We Met Along the Way

Harbor at Honfleur near Le Havre and the Cruise Ship, the Bizet

After an organized tour or two of Europe back in my younger days, I decided that this kind of travel wasn't for me.  It was too rushed to form any lasting impressions of the places that I visited.  I'm a slow impressor!

But Grand Circle's Seine cruise in 2003 changed my opinion.  It followed the route that my grandparents, Johann and Magdalena Meier with their children had traveled in 1861 and that's what I wanted to see.  The only drawback - my sister and I were traveling in a reverse direction.  But perhaps that was fitting.  My ancestors were never able to return to the "old country."  Instead I made the return, almost from the point where they boarded a ship at Le Havre, back along the Seine river to  Paris, still filled with magnificent structures at which they, peasant farmers from Germany, must have marveled.
Looking toward the port city of Le Havre, the last place in Europe the Irsch emigrants would see

Look from the Seine Estuary toward the English Channel

River Side Village on the way to Rouen

The Cathedral in Rouen

Rouen, the largest port city in Normandy

Coming ever closer to Paris
 The slow pace of our small ship, the Bizet, let me focus equally slowly on the route from Paris to Normandy.  I stood side by side with my long dead great-great grandmother Lena.  The gentle, unhurried sway of the ship gave me the time to look at the scenery with two sets of eyes, hers and mine.  Lena did not have a camera, but she had the astonishment of seeing a magnificent city which she had never expected to see and would never see again.  Perhaps her pictures, though not digital, were clearer than mine. 

Near Vernon

Arriving at Vernon

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