La Manche, la whole Manche and nothing but la Manche

Today's post will feature our day long outing to la Côte d'Albâtre or the Alabaster Coast. According to Wikipedia, la Côte d'Albâtre est située sur la Manche. That's completely in line with what we discovered today.

So the way this usually works is I am up first and among my before she gets up tasks is a determination of what the weather for the day is likely to be.

Today:  not so good.  I have been using weather.com whilst in Europe and today's forecast for Dieppe was 40% probability of morning rain turning to a 70% chance of steady rain for the afternoon.

We contemplated our options.  We could  either try to fill  a rainy day in Dieppe or go ahead and follow the original plan and dang the weather.  We are not likely to be here again, at least not until at the very earliest next year at this time, so we decided that you go where you go, you accept the conditions that are present there, you look at what you see, you open the camera shutter to what is there, you experience what the experience is and afterwards you go on with whatever comes next.

We decided to try to see the Alabaster Coast under whatever the conditions might be.

The FT noticed that the plantings for the entire length of Boulevard de Verdun, the street in front of our hotel, are all of a single type, a type which I believe is typical of an English garden.  These things are hollyhocks and they make the photo editing cut for today's post only by reason of the fact that you can see the cliff at the end of the Dieppe harbor in the background.

The cliff is, of course, the beginning point for us to tour this bit of coastline.  We first drove down to the very end of the Dieppe harbor to take a close look at the cliff that is the cliff that we have been able to see.

Mostly I am going to let the coast speak for itself.  We started out trying to follow a couple of guidebooks from which I had gleaned information about the coast.  The books ultimately were useful but very early in the actual driving we determined that we had to not be captives of the guides.  We had to make our own  choices and look at what interested us, not necessarily what interested Frommer's and the Green Guide.  We went rogue.

We ended up with one cardinal assumption.  Each and every time we had a choice we took the road that led closest to la Manche.  This led us to several occasions where either we had to stop or the driver coming from the other direction had to stop, the road wasn't wide enough for two.  We departed from the modern highway system and drove the tiny old back country that we have previously only seen on TV coverage of a bicycle race.

We stopped at a bunch  of places, I took, oh, I  dunno, like 50 photos, I have been through an extremely wrenching editing process, I like  these pictures, take a look you might like them too.

Eventually we were going to drive about 80 kilometers to a turn around point.  The first time  we absolutely had to stop came after less than 10 of those K.  The town there is Pourville sur mer, the very first town down the coast from Dieppe.  Before you even get to Pourville you come to a scenic overlook.

The weather at that point still seemed most likely to fulfill the weather.com prediction.  It was chilly and overcast but the scenery seemed way to pretty to pass up.

The road is sometimes quite close to the sea, running virtually along the top of the cliffs, and sometimes turns a fair bit inland.  We came back out to the sea at Veulettes sur mer.  There was parking available along the coast, not many people around,  we had been driving for a bit.  We stopped.

The sun was starting to make sporadic appearances.   You could see it in the sea water, the areas where sunshine was present were much more green than the other areas of the sea.  It was cold, very windy and ugly grey when we stopped but I could see some sun coming.  I informed the FT that we had to stick it out for a couple of minutes because I thought if the sun could make it out and just splash onto the down Manche cliff that I could get a pretty good photograph.

We left town and as was most often the case we headed around a turn up a valley and then around another turn and back up onto the top of the cliff.  This time the appearance of wind blown trees on the top of the cliff attracted our attention and we stopped for a photograph of that and ended up with a photo back down  into the spot where we had just been.

We were following the roads followed by the Tour de France when it was here a couple of weeks ago.  The Tour is, at least as it seems to me,  going through these tiny French towns each of which has an old stone church.  I taped that segment of the tour when they bicycled these roads and we will be watching that again when we get home  I think Cav wins a bunch sprint.

Here's the old stone church content for today, a church along the road of the Tour de France.  I am not sure of the name of the church but the tiny French town is Saint  Martin aux Buneaux.

A whim led me off the Tour route when an arrow pointed to a right turn by offering "La plage".  This opportunity came just before we arrived in the town of Saint Pierre en port.  There were lifeguards on duty, I am pretty sure we stumbled on to the town beach.

If you look carefully you may be able to spot a unicorn grazing in the pasture above the orange flag.  At least that's what it looked like to us.

We had lunch there, at Chez Marie.  The same sandwich we had become accustomed to  paying  5 euros for in Paris was 3 euros here and the bread was better.

Those people still in the establishment after we left are Englishers (obviously we could hear their conversation from our table) who have been coming to this town and this beach for 25 years.

 By now the possibility of precipitation had become irrelevant.  It wasn't going to rain, the sun  had come out,  it was going to be sunny and albeit windy, plenty, plenty nice enough for short sleeves on the north coast of France.  What had started out as a do the best you can do was turning out to be the best you can hope for day instead.

This is a bicycle blog.  Shortly after leaving la Plage but before arriving in the main village of Saint Pierre we received affirmation that the road we were driving was indeed the route of the Tour.

We had so much fun today that we ended up totally missing today's stage which having read the results we deeply regret.  I  repeat the sentiment written on the surface of the D79:  Allez Thomas Voeckler.  And also,  extremely well done.

There was a person parked on a hill and curve with one of what Paul calls a camper car the evasion of which slowed us down enough so that we jumped into a wide spot of shoulder and stopped ourselves to see this.  This is from the D79 looking down not at the village of but at la plage at Életot.

So . . .

We finally arrived at the spot that is the star attraction of the la Côte d'Albâtre, Étretat.

This is the view to the north showing the cliff including the naturally formed archway, the pathway to the top of the cliff and the chapel overlooking all.

But this is the view that everyone keeps coming back to, the view that has been described as an elephant sticking his trunk down into the sea to drink, the south view.

We made it back to Dieppe in plenty of time to discover that parking is still free.

And still completely not available.

OK, just a couple of small things which despite what the post title says are not strictly nothing but la Manche.

Rent a fence!!!!

The most pleasant monsieur of the madame monsieur ownership couple says they have different sorts of shows out there every weekend. Last weekend they had a circus, this weekend it is a horse show. No matter to us, we are on the road again tomorrow.

But, finally sunset over la Manche at Dieppe.

The weather report said rain and gloomy. Instead we had a perfect day.