Bayeux, France

We love Bayeux for the following reasons:

#1. We arrived in Bayeux on a market day. It wasn’t a big market per se, but an open air market nonetheless.

#2. Although La Rapière, wasn’t open for lunch

we happened upon this little bistro right across the street from the cathedral.

It offered a 15€ market-driven seasonal lunch menu consisting of a savory duck confit parmentier with Emmental chip, salad greens and Normandy farm cream, and a molten chocolate cake with caramel butter sauce, vanilla ice cream topped with a piece of burnt caramel. Super delicious!

#3. Planted towards the end of the French revolution, this magnificent 220-year old tree is a symbol of liberty and freedom.

#4. The spectacular Norman-Romanesque architecture of the Bayeux Cathedral (Hint: look for the arches).

A service is held each year on June 6th to commemorate the anniversary of D-Day Landing. Bayeux was the first French town to be liberated after the landing and is one of the few places in Calvados to have survived the WWII virtually undamaged.

#5. Bobbin lace making – Seeing masters at work braiding, twisting and pinning threads wound on bobbins at a little workshop. The price of each delicate piece is calculated by the number of hours dedicated to complete the work.

#6. Bayeux Tapestry. Seventy meters long and fifty centimeters by height, Bayeux Tapestry is technically not a tapestry. Embroidered rather than woven. it documents the invasion and conquest of England by Duke William II of Normandy, later known as William the Conqueror. Listed under the UNESCO Memory of the World Register – the treasures that record our history from 1700 BC to the present day – Bayeux tapestry is considered one of the best known work of Anglo-Saxon art.

#7 Cats

And finally…

#8. Look forward to our overnight stay at a unique Normandy farmhouse 15 kilometers from Bayeux. (Click here to find out more about it).