10 Normandy White Cliffs of Étretat

Breakfast at the hotal was not included, an additional 9 Euro for “the same old, same old, French breakfast” (no croissants). It was the only place to get coffee that we needed badly, we payed the price. We launched our 2 day exploration of the famous white cliffs of Étretat part of the ‘Côte d’Albâtre’ (Alabaster coast) located directly across the English Channel from the famous White Cliffs of Dover in England. We started at the town of Étretat. We thought the parking at Chartres was confusing this was triple the confusion. After we finding a parking spot, similar to finding parking in NY City but the town is only 6 blocks by 6 blocks. We were now confronted with another parking machine. Ugh! A confused crowd of tourists surrounded the machine. We tried another machine that said it was out of order. The machine surrounded by the crowd had no one from France or any other country that could get it to work. Ridiculous! We were told by a Canadian couple who spoke both French and English that they saw many cars with notes on the dash stating the parking machines were broken. The thought that our car would be towed away to “God knows where” worried us a bit. If it did get towed, how do we retrieve it? We kept trying the machines. Randomly, every

once in a while a machine would issue a tickets, it was like playing the lottery. I finally went to a shop keeper across the street and explained our dilemma as best I could. She was kind enough to give me a signed note to put on our dashboard stating the machines were not working. They were obviously used to this problem. When I got back to Jim he had gotten the ‘out of order’ parking machine to work. This whole situation was ’out of order’. We decided we would rather pay than take a chance on loosing our car. After an hour wasted in the parking lot we started our exploration of the cliffs. Breathtaking! The town of Étretat is at sea level with a 600 yd pebbled beach on the English Channel. The stones make an unusual tinkling scratchy sound with every wave. The beach is flanked with immense cliffs on both sides that span out along the coast for 80 miles. The cliffs rise 200’ to 300’ above the English Channel. Amazingly, beautiful and scary at both the top and bottom. The top scary for its height and

sheer drop offs. The bottom scary for the huge boulders that had crashed down to the beaches from above. We climbed the 250’ cliffs on the left. The scenery was astounding, not even the pictures do it justice. Giant arches stood defiantly cut by the erosion of the sea and weather. They were anchored to the sea floor many feet below the water. We waked about 1.5 mi along the cliff and spotted a beach 300’ down. We set that as our goal for the next day. We returned to the town of Étretat along the cliffs and looked for a place to eat, out of luck, all closed, ‘out to lunch’. We looked for any type of a food store, out of luck. We sat in our car and ate what food was left in our backpacks. On the way back to the hotel we used Jim’s life saving iPad to locate a small grocery and took dinner home with us. We toured our hotel grounds observing all the animals, taking more photos. We returned to our apartment and had our picnic dinner. We researched the beach we saw from 300’ up in the air on our computers and found a hiking trail starting inland and winding its way for about a mile to the secluded beach. We collapsed, Good Night.