Two mysteries remain this morning - what is a Mairie? and what is
wrong with me? I felt fine in bed, but as soon as I stood up I got
all dizzy and almost fell over!!
As for the Mairie - we could see a desk through the window? And a
sign nearby did have the word 'chapel' on it, but surely chapels are
more interesting than this plain brick building??
Onwards then to Giverny - home town to the impressionist painter
Claude Monet. To give him inspiration for his paintings, Monet
developed a garden complete with lily pond, which we now have the
privilege of visiting. In Monet's time one gardener was employed full
time just to look after the waterlillies.
To stand on a Japanese bridge in Monet's garden and see what he saw
before transferring it to canvas was a peaceful (minus Japanese
tourists) and surreal experience. If you screwed your eyes up and
blurred your vision (or unfocused the camera) you could almost
replicate these impressionist paintings. But whilst all that was fun,
seeing the garden in all it's focused glory was a real highlight of
our trip and beat visiting endless art galleries any day!!
Time to head back to the coast towards Calais. En route we went past
a couple of large 3 or 4 story brick buildings with the words
'Mairie-Ecole' on them. Ecole means school - so does that mean Mairie
is another word for school in this area?? Thats what we decided at
the time. Although we have all since been enlightened by sister
Angela's expert research skills. A Mairie is a Town/City Hall. That
made our one desk Mairie a very very small place of official decision
making!!
Our final sleeping spot was on the very windy coastline at Berck. It
took three moves along our designated area of parking to find a
sheltered enough spot to ensure that the wind wasn't going to keep us
up all night and Pat didn't get blown over.
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