Normandy has been in the news a lot this year! Not only did this beautiful French region mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings this summer, but it also hosted a magnificent festival to celebrate 150 years of Impressionism. We spent four marvellous days in October exploring the north of the region in our van in collaboration with Normandy Tourism and thought we'd share the itinerary they created for us as its a really good one.
This four day north Normandy road trip covers a lot of the region's highlights including some key D-Day sites, beautiful historic towns, fantastic museums and FOOD! We've included lots of restaurant recommendations where you can try Normandy's specialities.
Day 1: Bayeux
Catch the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Caen and then drive 40 minutes to the historic city of Bayeux. Visit the world famous, UNESCO listed Bayeux Tapestry, take a walking tour with Discovery Walks to learn about Bayeux's 2000 years of history and explore the city's magnificent cathedral. Bayeux stands out as one of the rare Norman cities that remained untouched by Allied bombing in World War II and so its streets are a treasure trove of historic buildings, half timbered medieval homes and grand mansions.
Be sure to read our full Bayeux itinerary for a more detailed plan.
Tapestry image provided by Normandy Tourism
End the day by driving to the British Normandy Memorial at Ver-Sur-Mer. Only opened in 2021, it's a beautiful, contemplative place to visit. Overlooking Gold Beach, one of the D-Day landing sites, you can walk through colonnades of pillars bearing the names of 22,000 servicemen killed in the Normandy campaign of 1944 and see a huge bronze statue of 3 soldiers coming ashore on D-Day. The paths mark out the pattern of the Union Jack flag and there is also a memorial dedicated to the thousands of French civilians killed during the war.
If you don't want to drive out, Bayeux has its own British and Commonwealth war cemetery 15 minutes walk from the cathedral, and a memorial garden dedicated to journalists and war correspondents killed while covering conflicts and terrorism around the world from WWII to the present day.
Eat: Have lunch at Gourmandise & Tradition for their three course set menu of delicious, creative comfort food and dinner at either Le Volet Qui Penche or L'Alcove. Both are intimate, cosy and serve fabulous French cuisine.
Stay: Hotel Reine Mathilde is a comfortable and perfectly located hotel in Bayeux's Old Town with a delicious continental buffet breakfast. Less than 5 minutes walk from the Bayeux Tapestry Museum and the Cathedral (our room had Cathedral views), Hotel Reine Mathilde is fantastic base for exploring the city.
Day 2: Beautiful Honfleur, Normandy's cheeses and Calvados!
Drive an hour and ten minutes to one of Normandy's artistic gems, the beautiful city of Honfleur. Spend the morning exploring its time capsule Old Town of medieval buildings and cobbled streets, admire the postcard perfect tall narrow houses reflected in the Vieux Bassin and step inside spectacular Eglise Sainte-Catherine, one of the largest wooden churches in France. This "sailors' church" has an epic double nave which looks like an upturned boat. If you're visiting between Easter and the end of October, you can take a ride on the beautiful harbourside vintage carousel!
Honfleur has some serious Impressionist heritage - Claude Monet's mentor Eugene Boudin was born in Honfleur and Monet and his contemporaries would often paint in the surrounding area. If you have time, you could pop into the Eugene Boudin museum to see works by Impressionist painters associated with Honfleur and the Seine Estuary including Monet and Boudin. (Closed Tuesdays, €8)
For the second half of your day, head to Pont-l'Eveque and stop at Fromagerie La Degusterie, 26 Rue Saint-Michel. Here you can order a mixed cheese and charcuterie board and sample Normandy's 4 special AOP cheeses: Camembert, Livarot, Neufchatel and Pont-l'Eveque. Why not pair it with a local cider?
Just outside of Pont-l'Eveque is the Pere Magloire Calvados Experience - an immersive 40 minute walk through time, exploring the history of Calvados, Normandy's special apple brandy, though a blend of impressive audio-visual and innovative dioramas. Your visit ends with a guided tasting!
Eat: Embrace Honfleur's fishing heritage with a delicious seafood lunch at La Grenouille. Have your dinner at either Le Volet Qui Penche or L'Alcove, depending on where you ate yesterday.
Stay: A second night back in Bayeux at Hotel Reine Mathilde
Day 3: D-Day sites: Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, the Normandy American Cemetery
and the Sainte-Mere-Eglise Airborne Museum
Start the day at Pointe du Hoc, an important WWII site where, on the morning of June 6th 1944, US Rangers took on the seemingly impossible task to scale the vast cliffs between Omaha and Utah Beaches in order to capture a critical German gun emplacement overlooking the landing beaches. The mission was a hard won success at a cost of almost 2/3 of the Rangers. The land is still absolutely covered in shell craters from Allied ships, and you can explore a couple of the German bunkers.
A short drive away, the American soldiers who landed on Omaha Beach suffered the most losses out of any of the Normandy Landing sites. This is the beach featured in Saving Private Ryan, and while it is peaceful and beautiful now, you can't quite imagine how utterly hellish it must have been for the 34,000 troops who came ashore on June 6th 1944. A modern metal sculpture stands on the sand in front of an older memorial: Created by Anilore Banon in 2004 for the 60th anniversary of the D-Day Landings, it is called Les Braves. The three sections are called The Wings of Hope, Rise, Freedom! and The Wings of Fraternity.
10 minutes drive away is the Normandy American Cemetery: row after row after row of white crosses (and 151 Stars of David) marking the graves of 9388 American troops. While we've visited large military cemeteries before, like Arlington National Cemetery close to Washington DC, this site is all the more sobering when you realise that all of these men lost their lives within a three month period rather than across decades. There is a large memorial with a reflecting pool and huge maps of troop movements during the Normandy Campaign, and a memorial wall dedicated to a further 1557 men whose bodies were never found at the time of the cemetery's creation. 19 of them have since been found and buried, and their names have a bronze rosette next to them.
Drive 36 minutes to Sainte-Mere-Eglise for lunch and to visit the Airborne Museum. Newly renovated to celebrate its 60th year and the 80th anniversary of D-Day, this is one of the largest WWII museums in the area and is an absolutely fascinating deep dive into the history of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and their roles in the Normandy invasion. We spent over 3 hours there! Along with spectacular audio-visual effects and lots of artefacts, the two treasures of the museum are a C-47 plane and, in the brand new WACO building, the only WWII glider in France, which landed close to the village during the Normandy Campaign. In building 1 there is an interesting exhibition about life in occupied Sainte-Mere-Eglise with some jarring Nazi possessions, uniform and propaganda.
One thing we really enjoyed at the museum was the Histopad - an ingenious tablet that allows you to travel back to 1944 and explore scenes and equipment when you scan special circles throughout the museum. As you leave, keep an eye out for the effigy of John Steele dangling from the church steeple - a parachutist with the 82nd Airborne who famously got his parachute snagged on the church during Operation Overlord.
Eat: Have lunch before you visit the Airborne Museum at Auberge John Steele, 4 Rue du Cap de Laine, Sainte-Mere-Eglise. They have a very reasonably priced 3 course set "Menu Trooper". Book a table for dinner at Les Ecuries, 29 rue du Général de Gaulle. Tucked away in an old stables, you can enjoy excellent local cuisine here from charcuterie to seafood to camembert baked in honey. The Isigny Cream ice cream is divine...
Stay: Domaine Utah Beach - Le Grand Hard - set in the countryside, just 7 minutes away from Utah Beach and 15 minutes from Sainte-Mere-Eglise, this luxurious hotel, built around an old farmhouse, has 19 comfortable rooms and 4 gites. Continental breakfast is available each morning in the on site restaurant (which also serves lunch and dinner menus featuring local produce and organic beef and veal from their own farm), and the hotel offers bikes to hire and even stabling for your horse! If you need to relax after a long day of sightseeing, you can enjoy the sauna and even book a massage.
N.B. The hotel and its restaurant close for the winter on November 24 and reopen in late March 2025.
Day 4: the Cotentin Peninsula - Beautiful Barfleur, an epic lighthouse and Cherbourg's spectacular maritime museum.
After breakfast at Domaine Utah Beach, check out and drive 40 minutes to one of France's official Most Beautiful Villages, Barfleur (The association of Les Plus Beaux Villages De France awards the title of "Most Beautiful Village in France" to 159 villages, due to their heritage, architecture, culture, and gastronomy. Normandy is home to 7 of them, including one we've previously visited: Saint-Ceneri-le-Gerei).
With its harbour full of brightly coloured fishing boats and grey granite houses, Barfleur, with a population of around just 700 residents is very different looking to other Norman villages. While you wont find medieval timbered houses here, the 17th and 18th century grey cottages built along a promontory off the very north eastern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula have pretty white shutters and intricate terracotta finials decorating their rooves.
At the end of the harbour is the stubby, squat St Nicolas Church and a large boulder with a plaque commemorating William the Conqueror and his ship, The Mora. It was from Barfleur that William and his Norman army set sail in1066 for England prior to the Battle of Hastings, after which, the port became the main departure point for Anglo-Norman kings between their two kingdoms.
Inside the church, head to the north transept to see a beautiful stained-glass window depicting the liberation of Barfleur in 1944 and Sainte Marie-Madeleine, born Julie Francoise-Catherine Postel in Barfleur in 1756. Sainte Marie-Madeleine was canonized in 1925 by Pope Pius XI for harbouring fugitive priests during the Revolution.
Take a stroll through the lanes behind the harbour. Opposite the church is the former home of Paul Signac, who along with Georges Seurat, was one of the fathers of the pointillism movement. Signac lived in the village from 1932 - 1935 and painted the harbour and lighthouse.
Leaving Barfleur, it's a very short drive to the second tallest lighthouse in France - the Phare de Gatteville. Standing at a lofty 233 feet high, for 3 Euros you can climb the 349 steps to the top for amazing views over the coastline and back to Barfleur.
(N.B. closed from 12:00 - 14:00)
Time to head to Cherbourg for lunch and a fantastic museum to finish the day. La Cite de la Mer is an enormous maritime museum with an intriguing Titanic exhibition, a sea life aquarium and a nuclear submarine to explore! Cherbourg was the penultimate stop for the Titanic before her fateful voyage across the ocean and the museum's ticket office and restaurant is situated inside the beautiful art deco terminal building for the Transatlantic boat train.
We've written about Titanic, Return to Cherbourg, the museum's permanent Titanic exhibition, in our blog about Titanic exhibitions around the world. La Cité de la Mer's interactive displays begins in the Baggage Hall, exploring the hopes and dreams of emigrants who boarded the Titanic in Cherbourg, many seeking a new life in America. Of the 281 passengers who joined the ship here, only 21 were French. The rest came from all over the world, including America, Lebanon, Russia and Uruguay.
Next, visitors descend a staircase and board the Titanic via a gangway through the ship's hull and enter an immersive world. You can walk the recreated outside decks of the Titanic, explore the various classes of accommodation aboard and see artefacts salvaged from the wrecksite including fragments of a chandelier, a clarinet, a sock and a purse. While the famous names onboard got plenty of press, the hundreds of "normal" passengers who perished have largely been forgotten. These personal items offer a glimpse at who some of them were.
Something that Cite de la Mer does exceptionally well is their reconstructed visual timeline of the Titanic's crossing and the tragic iceberg collision. Sitting at the bow of the ship, your whole field of vision is a huge screen depicting a first person view of the open sea ahead. A sped up timeline takes you through each sunrise and sunset from April 10th 1912 until 2:20am on April 15th, interspersed with anecdotes and sound effects from the passengers. As the enormous iceberg looms out of the gloom, the screen is filled with increasingly frantic messages sent between the stricken Titanic and other vessels, all too far away to get there in time. Walking around the rest of the exhibition, once the sinking begins, other reconstructed parts of the ship such as the First Class cabin and steerage corridor are also affected, covered with water through eerie immersive lighting effects and you'll hear snippets of audio from the passengers and crew in those areas. A separate room sheds light on the extensive investigations that followed the sinking, culminating in the ground-breaking discovery of the wreck in 1985.
Other museum highlights include Le Redoubtable, a colossal 1970s nuclear submarine with a 35 minute audio guide that leads you around the engine room, control centre, canteen, cabins and torpedo room, and The Ocean of the Future. This aquarium features 17 stunning tanks of colourful fish, jellyfish and sharks, climaxing with the 11 metre deep abyssal aquarium.
Once you've finished the museum, you're minutes way from the ferry port to catch the evening Brittany Ferries sailing back to Poole.
Eat: Book lunch in La Cite de la Mer's restaurant, The Quay of the Seas. From a local seafood platter to outstanding steak, mussels and some seriously naughty desserts, you can enjoy your meal with a harbour view. In keeping with the maritime theme, the restaurant is furnished with slatted wooden furniture and parasols, which gives the appearance of eating on the deck of a ship.
You might find these other Normandy blogs useful:
For more useful information, you can visit the Normandy Tourism website
Disclosure: We were invited and hosted on this trip by Normandy Tourism, but we were not paid to post and as always, all opinions are our own!
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