We'd been driving at least a couple hours when we hit Caen, home of great big castle and few open patisseries or places to use the toilette. Still, we managed to pull into one with a lovely proprietor who, though she didn't speak English, was all about loading us up with coffee and pastries. Everyone else found a pharmacy to pee at, and I found a castle.
Bennett DJ;d out of Tourlaville at my request. With kids in the back trying to sleep, I thought listening to a podcast was a good move. Bennett put on Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, a podcast I ended up loving. We listened to a great one in which Gladwell and his assistant take the LSAT as part of a research experiment.
After Caen, it's another 1-2 hours before we reach Etretat. It seems that something's happening there, because as we pull in, everyone is parked on the mountainside approach to the town and walking a footpath the rest of the way. Turns out the chalk cliffs of Etretat, with their delicately sea-carved arches are just that fucking cool and tourists (comme nous) are flocking to the place. Griffin and I drop everyone by the beach and drive back up the hill to find a parking space before we too join the throng.
Our return to Rouen was harried, pedal to the metal. The whole way I was driving like 120 kph. Once in town we spun round and round the roads before Bennett pointed us in the right direction and through the power of group-think we managed to land the car in parking lot P2, level -2, slot number 36. Griffin commented on the lunacy of handing a random, un-uniformed, young man the car keysand taking off without a receipt of any sort, but that's pretty much where we were at that point. We arrived on our train platform five minutes before the train departed.
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