Flying into Paris, and wanting to stay awake all day, the plan was to travel down into Paris to sail the Seine on the Bateau Mouche before heading back up to an airport hotel before picking up the rental car. Instead we traveled right up to Giverny and rented rooms in a small hotel in town, a few minutes walk from Monet’s home, studio and lilly pond with the oh so famous bridge.
After touring the gardens we headed north and through Honfleur (port used by the White Ship of English history fame (look up link???)) to a hotel on the eastern fringe of the D-Day beachs. The northernmost American landing area, Juno, was visited the next day. Wandering off the beach and past the WW II museum, I came upon a local coffee shop with a sign shown below proclaiming it was in the village of Quinville. Which has the same pronunciation as Josephine Quinneville’s last name, who as we know, was the wife of Alex De Lorme and migrated with him from St. Anicet to North Hudson, New York in 1875. Could Quinvelle. France perhaps have been the an ancestral home town?
In the next leg of the of the journey we visited Mont Saint Michel, then traveled south through towns mentioned in other ancestral records. Pictures of old churches were taken as they may have been the only structures remaining from the times when our ancestors lived there. Overnighting in Angers (home of another famous relic, the Beaux Tapestry portraying the French victory over the English in the Battle of Hastings in 1099 which completed the the Norman Conquest.
Chenehutte, the ancestral home of the Michel LeMay (dit DeLorme) who in 1653 traveled to Quebec in what was then New France.\
The final leg took us to Chartre to visit the Cathedral, Its rose windows that took so long to build they show the history of rose window development from almost the first window which is half stone and half glass to the third window is almost all glass with minimal stone. It was then on to Paris for Pete’s French Baguette baking class, which was down the hill from Sacre Coeur at the top of the hill in Montmartre, and visits to museums and dine in sidewalk cafes and bistros.