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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Wandering Wednesday Parisian Street Photography

Wandering Wednesdays

Long time, no post!  For the past two weeks I’ve been traveling around Paris and Normandy with my best friend, so I’ve pressed pause on the blog.  However, I’m back and ready to share my travels with you!  While I sort, edit, and write these new posts, I’ll leave you with another Wednesday wander through Parisian streets.  I should be back with a recap of our first road-trip day later this week!

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Wandering Wednesdays

Last week, I took a 4 hour-long walk through Paris, which is about 3 miles, according to the google map I made for myself.  The objective: photograph some specialty pastry shops for a blog I just started writing for (here’s an article I wrote for them).  I did end up finding the pastry shops I had intended to visit, but a couple of them were closed for the summer holidays (damn you, August!).  More importantly, I thoroughly enjoyed wandering somewhat aimlessly through smaller streets.  I made sure to wear comfortable shoes so that I had no reason to cut my day short.

The weather was absolutely crazy, the bipolar kind of crazy.  Every 30 minutes, there would be a sudden shift between sunny and stormy, and vice versa.  I think I managed to capture the extremes in these photos.  Since I took so many photos that day, I’ll just include half of what I captured; the other half will come next wednesday!

P.S. Two things I learned from editing these photos:  I really LOVE doors and windows.  Something about the possibilities that lie within, I suppose…

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Visual Diary: French Summer

How does one have a quintessential French summer?  The biggest requirement is to abandon all work and responsibilities and head for the beaches of Greece or the Côte d’Azure for the entirety of August – my version of a getaway will come later in the month.  What is also typically Parisian is attending an awesome music festival, and sipping cold rosé, which I also have not done yet, since I’m a hopeless home-body. What I have been doing, however, is enjoying the pleasant weather in the form of picnics, sunbathing, and lounging on the terrasse of bars and restaurants with friends.

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Wandering Wednesdays

I’m sure you all have been positively aching for some charming snapshots of Parisian streets, so I’ve hooked a sister (or bother) up!  :p  To be honest, this collection of photos didn’t actually require much “wandering” at all – they were all taken within a couple blocks of one another, on streets I’ve visited many times before.  But that doesn’t mean they’re familiar to you readers!

Odette is one of the cutest pastry shops in this city, so much so that it almost warrants the use of the term “adorbs,” but I won’t subject you to that kind of debauchery at this time.

As for the song above, it’s a classic from my high school days.  The song reminds me of summertime, so it was an obvious choice.

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