Being the patient soul that I am, I became frustrated very quickly because I had no idea where I was, what direction to go, and none of the streets had street signs, so even if I had a map I would be completely incapable of locating myself on it. So, I did what ever guy dreads to do... I stopped at a convenience store in the middle of a strange city in France and asked for help. It turns out that we were not so far off. The Hotel was located just about a 1/4 of a mile away. So I got back in the car with my bearings straight and headed toward the hotel. Now it is about 8:00 at night and the sun is at just the right angle that I am doing well enough to see the road in front of me with the glare from my windshield. That 1/4 of a mile ended up taking another 45 minutes to navigate after missed turn upon missed turn.
This is why Rouen was the best trip that almost never happened. At this point, my BP is through the roof and I am 2 seconds from getting back on the highway and heading to the one place I know how to get to... HOME! Instead, Stephanie does her best to calm me down and we find the street that we were looking for. It turns out that our hotel is actually very conveniently located if I just knew where I was going, or if I had a GPS.
After the experience at the hotel the night before, my expectations were not very high for this place. After checking in, the receptionist instructed us that we have to go back outside and down the road to the 1st door past the restaurant. I am thinking... here we go again. When we get up to our room I am pleasantly surprised. The room is quite nice, very clean, and one heck of a bargain for 80 bucks a night. Plus the view from our window was spectacular (see the bottom right photo of the cathedral lit up at night). We even got to enjoy a little music from the restaurant below. A little band was playing great musical selections like the Macarena until all hours of the night... seriously.
I had never really heard of Rouen until Stephanie brought it up a week before our trip. It turns out that it has quite some history. Rouen is the capital city of the Normandy region. In the late 1300's the city was hit hard by the bubonic plague and the majority of its inhabitants were wiped out. The city has an incredible number of cathedrals all within a short walking distance of one another. I am not talking small churches either, but rather huge cathedrals. Here are a few pictures of the ones we visited:
In addition to the impressive cathedrals, Rouen is very well known for its well preserved half-timbered buildings. It is quite impressive to look at these buildings that have endured some 6-700 years. You can tell the years are really beginning to wear on them though because some of the main support beams are starting to bow. The atmosphere with these buildings, the cobbled stone roads, and the lack of automobiles in the city center really makes you feel like you are walking down the streets in the 1400's.
As we continued on our walking tour, one of the points of interest was a courtyard of what is now an art school. The courtyard was used in the 1300's to pile bodies that had died from the plague. To really give the courtyard an erie feeling, the townspeople had carved signs of death in the wooden beams. It kind of felt like the scene of a horror movie.
To end our walking tour we went to the location that Rouen is most well know for - the site at which Joan of Arc was tied to a stake and burned alive for heresy. In the 1400's Joan of Arc led the French to several victories during the Hundred Years War. Her actions during this time led to the coronation of King Charles the 7th. However, some Duke in France had already claimed the thrown, so to undermine the legitimacy of King Charles' rule, he denounced Joan of Arc as a heretic and had her burned at the stake. Today there is a memorial at the site where she was burned and a church has been built in her name.
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