Ship Ahoy et Chip Away

 Walking around Honfleur was our focus again today. Brilliant sunshine accompanied us all morning, though it is still a little cool—enough to need to wear a toque and gloves. It really is a beautiful and quaint old town with so many tourists. The portion of town where our inn is located is in an old part  just off of the centre of town with a very steep hill to climb, but only one, so we figure it allows us to walk off our meals. On our particular street there isn’t a lot of daytime pedestrian traffic but it does increase a little in the evenings when people are in search of dinner.

BIP ET GO is the tagline that the government uses for the toll system here for the roadways. It seems to work very efficiently. If I was to translate, I believe it simply means Tap and Go. So you tap your credit card and the gate opens and you can exit your lane. It’s interesting because while everyone enters the toll bridge in an organized lane by lane fashion, it exits everyone into one giant lane so you just sort of feel your way freely until the roadway lanes open up ahead to the major highway. For those who are experienced travellers this is likely the way all toll roads work, but for us it was a fairly new experience.

We strolled down to the harbour and decided to tour La Mora which is an exhibit/museum on the history of William the Conqueror and shipbuilding. It seems to be a brand-new adventure. The guide takes you to a cinema room which closes you into a very modern space that is filled with contemporary stands of lit trees,  with an animated sparkling ceiling to give the impression of the sky. It starts off explaining how the Vikings came to Normandy and after about ten minutes in the room, the doors open and you exit to another room where you feel like you are on a ship, then another ten minutes in the next room where they give you the impression you are in a monastery or something similar, then the next ten minutes it’s like you are climbing into the boat, and finally you are on land where they describe the battle and William the Conqueror is crowned King. It’s really a very cool way that they have done the interactive cinema. A bit Star Wars meets Monty Python-esque. At the end of it all, you get to tour the actual shipbuilding yard where their goal is to recreate the building of the ship that William the Conqueror sailed on into battle with the Saxons. 

This is the yard where the ship is being built, a re-creation of William the Conqueror’s vessel. 

Check out the size of this log. It was massive. 

With only three carpenters on site I think it will be a long process to rebuild the boat. They were chipping away at the bark on the log to make it smooth to eventually use for the keel of the boat. It must have been an intensely sharp tool. After a few chips, they have to measure the angle to be sure they are doing it right.A pain-staking process for sure. My wood-working friends will appreciate my complete lack of proper building technique language (“chip-away”).