There Is no trouble leaving Paris (#8); Hertz delivers the rental Peugeot to our hotel, and we head towards Rouen. Traffic is very heavy at first, but we make it! It is the last week of September, 1982, and the weather changes from hot and humid to cloudy, cool, and windy. We eat a picnic lunch in the car then drive thru pretty little villages and cultivated rolling land with crops of strawberries, sugar beets, cabbage, wheat, pears and peaches, and round bales of hay.
The first two hotels we try in Rouen are full, but the second one calls and gets us a room at the Arcade Hotel, in a structure with a parking garage and a shopping mall. It is modern, with room and bath that looks like a ship cabin, but is functional and comfortable. It is raining hard, so we have a nice dinner at the hotel.
The next morning we take a bus to the town center, see the cathedral, walk thru Old Rouen, past the Pl. du Vieux Marché where Joan d’Arc was burned, to a market where we buy pears, and to the tourist office. We had asked to stay at the Arcade another night, but it is full, so we decide to reserve ahead for rooms. The tourist offices are handy for this; for a small fee they will telex ahead for reservations and collect a deposit. Small offices don’t have telex and only handle local hotels. In most of France it is easy to get a hotel room by stopping fairly early in the afternoon, but not in tourist areas.
Back to the Hotel Arcade to check out, then after lunch we drive into Rouen. Betty goes to the Flaubert Museum of Medicine while Glenn rests and reads the car manual. Then to the Beaux Arts Museum to see interesting displays of Rouen ceramics as well as paintings and other objects d’arte. Then it is on to Honfleur and the Belvedere Hotel.
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