Our Normandy-to-Paris Seine River Cruise by Steve Parks

April in Paris sounded almost too good to be true when we booked our Seine River cruise last December. But we vastly underestimated our good fortune. As best expressed in French, our vacation was c’est magnifique.

The cruise part of the Grand Circle Cruise Line experience didn’t begin until we arrived by bus to Honfleur, a port city near the Normandy beaches and the cemeteries marking the D-Day sacrifice of so many on June 6, 1944. We learned that the Germans didn’t bomb Honfleur as Nazi troops were stationed there.

Along with 100 other passengers, mostly Americans, we were welcomed aboard by a crew of 35 who, along with our tour guides, pampered and herded us from site to site, day to day, with skills ranging from entertaining to enlightening. In the first category, good culinary taste and cheerful service accounted for three pre-paid meals a day aboard the Bizet, our cruise ship, along with cocktail hours and post-dinner shows – among them a harp-and-cello duet and a can-can burlesque to remind us we’re in France.

As for enlightenment, read on.

My wife Liz and I had longed to return to Paris, which we first visited two years before our wedding 42 years ago. But it was the site of the D-Day landing – saving the world from Nazi dominion – that I most wanted to explore. By bus from Paris, our first stop was the Peace Memorial in Caen. The effects of wars, the why and how WWI and II were fought – from the Holocaust to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – made our later walk on Omaha Beach all the more sobering as we faced the high ground from which German artillery rained death on so many who dared to cross the long stretch of exposed-target terrain. Our expert guide filled in more pertinent detail than I could hope to retain. No time to scribble notes.

The American cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer, with Omaha Beach just yards from its western edge, is hallowed ground kept in pristine condition, with rows of 9,238 perfectly aligned crosses along with 149 Stars of David – 9,387 gravesites in all. On the beach that afternoon, with the ocean at my back, I could hardly fathom the courage it took to charge across the unimaginably treacherous wet sand of that day.

My biggest physical challenge of our trip occurred the previous day while climbing what seemed like endless steps up one of the Cliffs of Etretat, known for its sheer chalk-white natural walls with rock arches that attracted artists from Monet to Courbet. Although our program directors rated the difficulty of walks on our tours from “one to three shoes,” I gave the Cliffs a difficulty rating of “seven shoes.”

From the coast, we cruised up the Seine mostly by day, encountering six locks allowing the Bizet to scale the altitude toward Paris. We docked first at Rouen, the capital of Normandy, an administrative region of France (think province) almost the size of Maryland. We disembarked on the only rainy day of our trip, sheltering awhile inside Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Rouen. Taller than Paris’ Notre Dame, Monet painted it 30 times. Like many great European cathedrals, construction spanned centuries, in this case the 12th through 19th. Among its celebrity tombs is one bearing the heart of Richard the Lionheart.

The cathedral somehow survived bombings that leveled much of downtown, rebuilt with wider avenues next to stretches of half-timbered Tudor-style structures on either side of cobblestone streets that make for rocky pedestrian passageways. A shopping thoroughfare that crosses beneath Le Gros-Horloge, a 14th-century astronomical clock, leads to the Old Market Square where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy in 1431. Incongruously, a sleekly modern church with a wall of stained-glass windows is dedicated to her – well worth a peek inside.

The next stop along the river was most notable to me for the 1,200-foot walk up to the ruins of the medieval Chateau Gailliard (circa 1196) constructed for Richard the Lionheart who was then both King of England and Duke of Normandy. The climb – a four-shoe rating on my scale – paid off with a grand view of the bend in the Seine far below.

 The next day’s early-riser destination was perfectly timed by our captain and program guides to get us to Monet’s famous Giverny home and gardens just before the grounds opened that morning. We beat the crowds and had time to see everything we wanted with 20 minutes to spare. The tulips and irises were in their sunny-morning glory as Liz stood before a scene as beautiful as any Monet still life which she captured in a smart-phone millisecond. Every room of his home with stunning garden views was a masterpiece of artistic taste all its own.

Just when we thought this could not be equaled, the optional Path of Van Gogh tour charmed us with its simplicity. Auvers-sur-Oise is the quaint but quietly elegant village where Van Gogh spent his last months painting at a manic pace. The tavern where he lived and died in a tiny attic room is still in business. Except for a traffic light or two, every part of the town exudes the aura of what Van Gogh inhabited and painted. You can still dine at Auberge Ravoux, a restaurant where he met Dr. Gachet, his physician, confidant and art patron. Just up the hill is Eglise Notre-Dame de l’Assomption which caught Van Gogh’s painterly eye. Just beyond, we climbed up to the fields of wheat he brush-stroked so obsessively – now covered in even-brighter yellow acres of canola you see all over the region today. Nearby is the graveyard where he and his brother Theo, who died six months after Vincent, are buried.

We arrived in Paris late that night as the Eiffel Tower blinked its lights like a skyscraper Christmas tree. The morning bus tour to the usual Paris tourist attractions was enlivened by our local guide with a keen sense of comic irony and a grasp of the history behind each site from the Arc d’Triomphe and Champs-Elysee to the Louvre and Tuileries Garden.

 Liz and I spent all our afternoon free time in the Musee d’Orsay where, aside from the special Renoir exhibit and the Impressionist masterpieces that adorn all the fifth floor, we were thrilled by a couple of galleries with Van Gogh paintings of scenes we had seen in person just the day before, and another featuring Monet still lifes of his garden we visited the day before that, plus three of the 30 paintings Monet rendered of the Notre-Dame at Rouen.

On our final day, we flagged down a cab in front of the Paris Opera House to take us to the most famous Notre Dame in France. Despite an intimidatingly long and winding line of visitors for free admission, we entered in about 20 minutes and were struck by how much brighter the magnificent interior seemed compared to what we recalled from long before the devastating 2019 fire. Centuries of grime had accumulated to such a degree that the walls darkened everything but the filtered light through the stained glass windows, including the miraculously rescued North Rose Window with its circa 1250 Virgin Mary.

Leaving Notre Dame, we still had a couple of hours for an al-fresco lunch at a Boulevard Saint-Germain bistro followed by a stroll along a few Left Bank blocks of the Seine. We then hailed a cab to reboard the ship for an after-dark cruise beneath many of the river’s 37 bridges in Paris. (All were too low for a Viking ship docked near us to clear.) So it was a special treat to see the City of Lights up close from our low-slung river view. We stayed up past our bedtime, requiring an alarm to catch a 5:25 ride to Charles de Gaulle Airport for our 9 a.m. au revoir flight home.