If you happen to be in Caen, just behind the station, and in need of some food, you could do a lot worse than pop into Le Bistrot Saint Michel (6 Rue Saint Michel). Fabulous food with only a few choices, cidre of many types and the smoothest 15 year old Calvados ever. They also include Liverot on their cheese plate which pleased me no end.
It was the perfect place to sit and fill your tummy and soul after a day of quite a lot of driving though not for me (or Lorna or Anthea). Still, we all had to sit in the cars and watch the French countryside slide by in temperatures that reached 25° so we all sort of suffered through it. I can’t speak for the other car but there was no sleeping in ours.
It helped that we had a lovely rest at an aire de repose at about the halfway point where we ate cheese, baguette, apple and crisps…well, some of us did. And though we all wanted beer we made do with water.
You can see by the photo how lovely the day was though I do wonder where Anthea’s sunnies are.
The cheese and various other essential supplies had been selected and purchased from the usual Auchan super marche and the Majestic which are both quite close by the exit of the Chunnel train from which we emerged after having a delightfully dull train trip under the channel.
At about 6ish we reached Caen and managed to find our accommodation even though Mildred tried her very best to send us somewhere else. (Mildred is John’s Satnav and a grumpy old thing she is too!) Perhaps the sight of a couple of French chaps racing passed us on the motorway riding what appeared to be a sit on mower, put her off her game a bit. It certainly made John chuckle.
Our apartment (which is really a three storey town house of faded glory) is not far from the wrong side of the tracks. We know because we had to follow the tracks down to the restaurant, passing lots of the sort of people one expects to find on the wrong side of the tracks. There was also somewhere called ‘Sexy Shop’ but things were so depressed on the wrong side of the tracks that it was closed and up for sale.
Still, while the location is nothing to rave about (except in terms of scale of badness) the place is amazing. As well as off street parking behind big electric gates, there’s also a sizeable garden.
We were literally spoiled for choice with the 37 bedrooms though no-one was particularly keen on the dead baby room. This had an old haunted bassinet in it which rocked when no-one was looking. It was super creepy and best avoided. I thought we possibly could have exorcised it with the Jesus ham but decided better of it. I mean the baby may have decided to possess the ham!
After a fair bit of deliberation, we all picked a floor and settled in while John searched the surrounding area for somewhere good to drink. And eat. The gallons of beer we’d bought at Auchan were way too hot to be good for man or beast and had gone straight in the fridge but refused to be drinkable for at least six hours. That was a completely unreasonable time to wait. We headed down the wrong side of the tracks instead.
Full to the brim with delicious French food, cidre and calvados, we eventually waddled our way back up the tracks to the sanctuary of our apartment cum mansion.
It was then bed for our intrepid and fading rapidly, Weasels.
Sounds like my kind of place lol