Day 05 – Tuesday 31^st May

Sharks and beer?

Yes, who’d have thought that the phrase “Sharks and beer” would have appeared on the same page – at least in a blog that’s not about Australian beaches! So, what’s it all about?

Sharks in the Channel?

The day dawned very wet & windy – fortunately, we were going under rather than on the Channel as I’m sure that boats would have been a little unsteady! What was quite disconcerting was the child with the family in the car in front of us. He was looking out of the small window in the coach shouting out that they could see 3 sharks! I Tweeted this & fortunately received reassurance from Eurotunnel that there were no shark warnings today! The same child also shouted “It’s gone dark; we’re under the water”. Then warning his parents not to open the door “otherwise we’ll all die!” This was probably our least enjoyable crossing!!  😆

A gentle start

Because of the weather, we decided against our initial plans of a walk around Dunkirk, so we headed directly to Rouen instead. This meant that we could take our time, rather than charging down on the motorway as usually happens. Given that we had an overall longer journey south this year as we were making our way down to Évron, this provided a gentler start to the tour.

As usual, we’d planned some of our journey to try to include breweries – whether “old friends” or new ones (at least to us) so it came as a little bit of a surprise to spot a new brewery where we weren’t expecting one. Unfortunately, it was a little early for both food so we went on our way without taking the opportunity to either try or buy their beer!

We lunched at Montreuil where we expected to find a brewery but didn’t. We did find a pleasant bar though

Cloudy, but tasty beer at Chant du Loup

We had an uneventful journey to Rouen. Here we searched for a specialist beer bar we had found on-line. Eventually we found it – it was no longer trading! 

Then up to the Chant du Loup just outside of Rouen & a beer with Patrick the owner. Unfortunately, the beer wasn’t quite ready – Patrick had warned us that it was two weeks from being ready & was still very cloudy. Unfortunately, being an amber coloured beer, it had the colour of a river in flood! Having said that, it’s taste was really good & everything that Glyn & I like in a beer.

We then visited the nearby pizza restaurant for some food before heading to our beds for our first night’s sleep in France in 2016.