As a gift to our father who turned 70 years last year (2022), we gave him a weekend to Normandie in France. Some historic exploration and lots of good food and company.
I started off by waking up a bit early, probably because of some travel fever. We had decided to meet up at Arlanda at 8, with the plane taking off at 10:20. First time traveling with Transavia which didn’t have the best start when they decided to move our flight from Wednesday evening to Thursday morning (although for a few months ago). I also discovered during the morning that they fly from Terminal 2 and not 5, so we had to reroute our taxis 🙂
After checking in a couple of bags we had a second breakfast at Starbucks talking about the expectations of this trip. While we were waiting to board the plane, the staff walked around looking for hand luggage that could go in the hold since it was (according to their statement) a full flight (which proved to be false). We surrendered our dads’ bag and by that had made the good deed of the week.
The flight itself was quite uneventful and I watched a bunch of TV shows during the almost three hours of flight time. We collected the bags and then went looking for the rental cars. Found the Budget desk and he brought up our reservation. However, since our flight was moved, we picked up the car five hours later than it was reserved. This meant a change in price which bumped it from ~€500 to ~€800. I was not happy because I called Budget in Sweden a few weeks back asking about this and that agent told me they would work it out. The local staff couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do anything about it and since we didn’t expect to find any other car at a lower price on the spot we took the car and got the guy’s name and will make a complaint when back in Sweden to see if we can get back any money.
Anyhow, found the car in the rather big garage and it was a rather roomy Renault Scenic, with automatic gear, adaptive cruise control, and Android Auto. Quite nice to drive even though it doesn’t have the most powerful engine and we are four fully grown men as cargo 😉
We stopped to find a supermarket to get some snacks and ended up circling around the same apartment complex twice before finding a parking spot and the store itself. We expected the drive to Caen to take about 2,5 hours (plus about 30 minutes of snack time) but ended up taking about four hours because of traffic. Waze led us off the highway twice and it’s hard to know if it was correct or not. We decided however to just go with the GPS and be happy about it.
We arrived at the Brit Hotel Caen Nord at about 18 and had a dinner reservation at 19 so quick check-in, unpack in the rooms, and then back to the car to find the restaurant in the city center. It was easier than expected to find a parking spot, which ended up costing us €0,20 because of ascension day.
Daniel had reserved a table at Bouef & Cow. Our server was a really funny guy, playing around and at the same time helping us decide what to eat and drink. After some starters, we had a delicious meat platter which consisted of about 1 kg of different meat and some fries. We topped off with some dessert while Dad ordered Calvados and coffee. Our server brought two shots(!) of Calvados, one for Dad and one for himself.
Well fed and happy we got went back to the car, drove to the hotel, and ended the evening with some cards and writing this blog post. Tomorrow we are going on a guided tour of the beaches and areas around.
