Vacapedia Vacation Rentals Blog

If I were to think back to what got me started thinking about being a perpetual traveler to Europe it would be the coastal village of Honfleur. Really. The guidebook descriptions of it got to me in a big way. I’ve always known the facts as presented to the travel courts: the light and the “quaintness” of it have made the coastal village of Honfleur an artists mecca, even today, when you don’t hear much about artists flocking to a particular place.

And you know what? I’ve been traveling to Europe since 1976 and I still haven’t been to Honfleur.

In some ways, that doesn’t bother me. There should always be a place you know you would enjoy on the next trip. Honfleur is my carrot, or perhaps the truffle that still awaits under the old oak tree.

Honfleur is in Haute Normandy, or Upper Normandy. It’s a place where the coastal fog diffuses the light, making everything you see richer–even the lilly pads–an aspect of light that the impressionists ate up, especially around Giverny and the house of Claude Monet. Giverny is also in Haute Normandy.

The other things that would attract me are the traditional foods, the rich foods of lush Normandy, doused in some of France’s best cream and butter (I am on vacation, thus I can afford to thumb my nose at the Food Puritans who’ve torn the great doors off the cathedrals of fine living). In any case you could ream out your arteries with ample doses of the local apple brandy called calvados, which I prefer to the grape variety.

Maison de Josephine - Normandy Vacation Rental

There are the evocative, half-timbered cottages in the Normandy countryside like the one to the right. Maison de Josephine just plays the part of an artist’s cottage, doesn’t it? I mean you want to put on a beret and begin to hold up a messy brush to sight a point on the landscape you’re painting at the moment, don’t you? Imagine what kind of vacation pictures you could take of your cottage and the landscape. You wouldn’t have to leave your home to impress your friends and neighbors.

Did you know that half-timbered houses were designed to be dismantled and moved easily? That fact has nothing to do with this story, I just thought it was an interesting fact. Don’t get too many ideas about dismantaling Maison de Josephine and carting it off to Cleveland or somewheres just because you read something goofy here…

Anyway, you could rent this place and visit Giverny, where Monet did some of his finest painting, and of course Mont Saint Michel isn’t so far away, and of course you could visit Honfleur and bask in the light of its beautiful picturesque port, and of course you could tell me how it all is.

Maybe if your description is good enough, it will entice me to go there. I don’t want to rush into things, but who knows how high airline fares will go?