France Road Trip Cider Route

Road Trip Day 2 – Calvados & Bayeux

My best friend Natalie and I decided to take a quick 4-day road trip through France, more specifically, Normandy.  What follows is an account of the events, sights, and stories that took place.  This is just part 2 – you can see day 1 HERE and day 3 HERE.


We arose bright and early in Rouen that partly-cloudy September morning, had a breakfast of chocolate-covered madeleines, then jumped in our little European car.  After 25 minutes of driving in circles, a car ride that was interspersed with frequent shouts of panic and confusion, we finally found our way onto the correct motorway!  The roads in cities can be absolutely impossible with their roundabouts, one-way streets, and indecipherable road name signs. (Somebody please tell me why the road names are in size-2 font and buried on sides of cluttered buildings???) Almost as soon as we found the correct motorway, we were already exiting onto smaller roads that ran through rolling green hills, dotted with cream-colored cows.  Every so often we’d see lines of apple trees, evidence that we’d entered the region of cider production. Our first stop of the day was Cambremer, a central town on the Cider Route, which runs through an area known as the Pays d’Auge in the Region of Calvados.  We didn’t do the entire route, which consists of cider distilleries, gardens, farms, and gorgeous country roads, but the few stops we did make provided a nice overview of the entire area.

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