Normandy - to Cambremer

   We figured that rather than pick up our rent-a-car in downtown Paris and battle the fearful Paris rush-hour traffic, it made more sense to take a cab back out to the airport, pick the car up there, (especially since we would also drop it off there on our way out) and get straight on to the motorway out of the Paris area. It was a sound idea. The practice was a little less than perfect.
We arrived to the Europcar desk at terminal 2C only to find a sign stating that the desk workers were out drinking coffee with their lawyers. At least we were advised to go to the Europcar office in the car-park. There they weren't striking. Maybe on the following day the workers in the car-park were striking and the 2C counter workers were on the job. Judging by the amount of time it took to process the 3 people in front of us and then our booking, I'm not sure that I could tell the difference whether they were striking or not. What is certain is that judging by the snarly service, they would rather have been on strike. I would say that the French in general and Parisians in particular believe that giving service is beneath them. The theory is that if Paris is the greatest city in the world and its ours, then it's beneath us to serve those not from the greatest city and those that don't speak the greatest language. The foreign tourists will come anyway, whether we're nice or not...and they're right. So why bother trying to be nice when we don't really want to be? There's sort of a twisted logic to it.
In any case, by 10 a.m. we had our very nice Peugeot 3008 and hit the motorway. Sort of. The girl with the snotty English accent and polite manners who was our GPS recommended that we let her guide us on an alternate route out of Paris in order to avert the traffic on the motorway. We agreed, figuring that the GPS knew better than us. Big mistake.The alternate route took us through every town and village on the northern outskirts of Greater Paris, taking special care to lead us into places that had an extraordinary number of traffic lights and roadworks. An hour after taking the wheel we were halfway into the Paris suburban district and Yoni, who was driving, was about to have a nervous breakdown. A regular, paper, hard-copy map may have helped but it seems that in the second decade of the 21st century we're so reliant on electronic gadgetry that we smugly ignore what was good for the previous 2000 years. In the end, we turned the girl off, found our way back onto the highway and got out of Paris using something that we hadn't previously thought of...common sense and road signs.
Only when we were convinced that Paris was behind us did we turn the girl back on and allow her to guide us to our first stop, the cheese making town of Liverot. Even before we had our first taste of the local cheese we had a taste of the prevalent Norman architecture; what us Anglo-Saxons like to call Tudor style. In many places in Normandy the houses' external structures consist of criss-cross wooden beams filled with cement or stones. I imagine that without constant attention these buildings would fall into shabby disrepair, but we almost never saw evidence of this. Universally the hundreds-of-years-old houses were immaculately maintained. A proud people, these French.

The cheese factory of Liverot turned out to be not nearly as charming as the town itself. We sort of expected beret wearing, red-cheeked French peasants separating the curds from the whey by traditional methods, but got, instead, a spotless modern factory with stainless steel piping and enormous holding tanks. Then, at the end of the tour we arrived to the boutique and we quickly realized that it made no difference what-so-ever how and who made the cheese. Liverot , a ripened, Camembert style cheese, is sensational. I say "Camembert style" only to give a rough idea of the style of cheese.  Camembert is a different village in Normandy and their world famous cheese is quite different in flavour and texture to the Liverot. The cheese was so good that we bought 2 different types in preparation for the picnic lunch that we were planning, as well as a bottle of fresh, unfiltered apple juice and a large bottle of apple cider. Normandy is the apple capital of France and the cider there is like nothing that I've had anywhere else. Man does not live by cheese alone, however. It has been said that when a town is set up in Australia they build a pub first and all the rest comes later. The Italians will sit around in the cafe-bar before they even consider building the village around it. In France, they set up the boulangerie, charcuterie , patisserie and restaurant  first and then the rest follows. So there we were, in downtown Liverot, with some very hard decisions...namely which shop to go into and once in the shop, what to buy from the infinite range of baked goods and cured meats. With 2 types of traditional bread, some sausage, home-cooked leg-ham slices, butter and a few more goodies, we were ready to set off to find the ideal picnic spot. We'll just stop off into the local green-grocer to get some veges. The very jolly proprietor saw that we had a bottle of commercially made local cider under our arms and suggested that we taste his cider, which he makes himself out the back of the shop. I think he stomps on the apples himself with his bare feet. In any case, we've never been ones that refuse a free sample of locally made produce anda s is so often the case, his cider was amazing. It tasted fresher and earthier (probably as a result of his bare-foot tramping methode tradtionale) than the commercially made one, and we thought that the commercial one was excellent. When we said that it was great and we would return later to buy a bottle, his jolly demeanor suddenly turned tragic. He plainly didn't believe that we would return and looked as if he was about to burst into tears. We had no moral choice but to put out 3 Euro for a bottle of his moon-shine, grabbing some strawberries and a few other things that we didn't need along the way. We asked if perhaps we could borrow a knife to cut our goodies up with, which he donated freely to the cause. He also recommended the best picnic spot in the area, on a crest overlooking the surrounding hills. I make it sound as if we were having long, full discourses with the gentleman, which is plainly not the case, since we spoke almost no French and he spoke the corresponding amount of English. It just goes to show how easy it is to communicate armed with only a healthy dose of smiles, desire and good humour. We found the picnic table on top of the hill where he said it would be (we weren't entirely sure that we understood his instructions), laid out our goods and had the perfect lunch, overlooking the green Normandy countryside.
We were, after all, on holiday, so there was no rush, but we did eventually have to move. Otherwise we could have stayed there at our picnic table for ever. After the frustrations of morning urban traffic jams and the boredom of highway driving, we unanimously decided that around Normandy it was to be only back-roads. Of course "unanimous" is only a figurative term. We knew after our previous Umbria trip that the true decision making was in the sole hands of Il Capitano, one who goes by the name of Yoni. We even had  trouble implementing even small tokens of independent decision making, like basic window democracy within the car. Truth be said, we liked it that way, having someone make all the decisions for us. Well, mostly.

We ambled on towards our lodgings for the next 2 nights, a place called les marronniers (www.les-marronniers.com) just outside the village of Cambremer. We made good on our oath to avoid the highways, traveling on country roads just wide enough for 2 cars to pass each other. Sometimes these turned into lanes that were barely wide enough for one car to travel down and were dark, in the middle of the day, such was the foliage cover overhead. These roads took us through medieval villages straight out of  postcards. We knew the general direction we needed to go but didn't mind finding that we'd taken a wrong turn. In the end we needed to activate miss know-it-all to guide us to the exact location. Along the way we decided that we'd take a detour to St Pierre Sur Dive because the name just sounds so romantic and we were having some caffeine withdrawals. As we wandered through this village that was every bit as romantic as its name, we stumbled on the local church. It was reasonably large and impressive, but nothing that would have the scholars of the history of architecture making pilgrimage here for. Still, I figured it was worth a look. The inside  was a little more impressive than the exterior, with stained glass windows, choral music playing through the PA system giving a holy ambiance, numerous chapels, a large pipe organ and concrete struts holding up the structure. The usual. Then we spotted 2 large banners draped from the ceiling. One had 2011 printed on it. The other 1011. This church was 1000 years old and I doubt whether anyone outside the village of St. Pierre Sur Dive was aware of the fact or even found it vaguely interesting. "Ho hum, this back-country church is a piddling 1000 years old. You, know, they're a dime a dozen here in Normandy". Well, I was impressed.
After continuing on our stroll and a cup of coffee we headed to our gite at Cambremer. We were given some rest time by the task master, freshened up and at 8.30 headed into town to eat at the local restaurant. This may be a one-horse village but you needn't worry, it still has the obligatory country restaurant, which was full, on a wednesday night. Au P'tit Normande (http://www.restaurant-au-ptit-normand.com/) serves local fare which includes steak smothered in melted camember cheese and chicken cooked in apple cider. Decisions, decisions.
By the time we made it back to our B+B, we were so enchanted with  rural Normandy that we had almost forgotten that 15 hours previously we were in Paris.