Cherbourg to Quineville (Utah) 40km

Well, the Premium Lounge seats are not conducive to sleeping! A bit like being on a plane, but bigger seats although you can’t lift the armrests and lie down. On the positive side, it wasn’t very busy, they had usb chargers and it was only a (compulsory) fiver. To be fair, it was a nice crossing. Both dinner and breakfast were good and reasonably priced.

We were disembarking at 7:00 (UK time), which for some reason meant everyone was woken up at 5:30. Luckily I was already up and about trying (unsuccessfully) to track down a coffee. At about 6:30 we were allowed down to the car decks, where there seemed to be quite a few historic army jeeps and people in old school uniforms. I’m sure they were re-enactment people and I wonder if I’ll come across them on my tour of the landing beaches. As I hooked my pannier back on my bike I’m sure I heard a “splurffurtt” as the back wheel rolled forward. Over recent weeks, I’ve been plagued with a puncture in my tubeless tyre. I’ve tried everything, new sealant, plugging the hole and the only thing that worked was a patch on the inside. Except now it seems it hasn’t worked. The tyre was still pretty hard, so I decided to ignore the problem. Getting off the ferry was pretty quick, and passport control was brief. I don’t know when the new controls will be brought in, but that will slow everything up!

I headed into Cherbourg for a quick look around and a coffee. It’s a nice town, but not a patch on St Malo, which was such a surprise when I landed there on my last French tour. OpenStreetMap revealed another tap which hopefully will resolve another issue from my Loire trip, when I spent ages scouring cemeteries for water taps!

I decided to take a direct route to my first stop. I was feeling pretty tired due to lack of sleep (and 100km yesterday) and the tyre might become a problem. I was aiming for Quineville which is at the western end of all the landing beaches and Utah beach was the most westerly. The route retraced my steps all the way back to the port entrance, before heading off through the suburbs.

The roads are so quiet. I was following D roads but there was so little traffic. My problems started on the uphill, when I was cycling very slowly and could hear the hiss of air every time the puncture was distorted as it touched the road. I stopped a few times to pump it up. It wasn’t really an issue at normal speeds but just lost too much air on the climbs. I decided it was a problem for later. I passed my first memorial for some allied airmen and was soon in Quineville. It was still early but I checked with a campsite that they had room, but I could only check in at 3pm.

Luckily, there was a lovely beach, and with the tide out had sand yachts, a world war 2 museum, a biscuit factory and numerous cafes. I chose the museum followed by a sleep on the beach. The museum was really interesting and refreshed my knowledge of WW2 and how it was perceived by the French. It covered the whole wartime period, so was a perfect introduction/refresh to my O level history.

My key take-aways were. The French army was well trained, were better equipped and outnumbered the Germans. However, they were prepared for trench warfare and were told to stay in the trenches, while the Germans blitzkreig through and were many miles behind the trenches before anyone knew what was happening.

The museum painted a good picture addressing the difficulties in reconciling the occupation during and after the war. With the collaboration of Vichy France and the occupied Free France under De Gaulle. To such an extent that a very successful general, Leclerc, who was in the UK and a key figure in the liberation of france after the D-Day landings had to adopt this assumed name to prevent repercussions to his family in France.

Most interesting was the sinking of the Lancastria off Cherbourg. This is probably the worst loss of life in British shipping. I hadn’t heard about it, and the museum says I won’t until 2040 as its an official secret in the UK!

The museum was part of a German gun emplacement. The gun was aimed at an unsuspecting holidaymaker and parasol. Some of the emplacements were disguised as houses, which must have made the landings and the men on the beaches even worse.

There was a really good temporary exhibition about the 1936 Olympics. Some interesting snippits like, there was a car race/rally event all around Germany. Mainly german/aligned countries, all in Mercs, BMWs and Auto Unions (Audi). The event was cancelled when it was won by a British woman in a Singer car, it didn’t show the strength of german manufacturing haha. The medal table didn’t look good for GB.

Enough museum stuff. After a sleep on the beach, I went back to the campsite, who didn’t actually have room but managed to find me a spot on the main route to the toilets. Perhaps I should have carried on cycling. I then had coffee, cake and a few samples in the biscuit factory, so perhaps it was the correct plan after all.

I do like camping. Dinner was a nice mess of pasta and pesto which I’d carried. Supplemented with local tomatoes and (some sort of) tinned fish in tomato sauce. It was a big whole fish, not fillets or sardines like we get. The pudding was a weird local rice pudding thing, with an incredibly thick skin on the top. It was excellent, but I know plenty of people who would run a mile!

I did some pondering over a couple of local beers and walks along the beach. Eventually  I decided to stop messing around and put an inner  tube in my leaking tyre. I had other options, but this seems to be the best and ironically the messiest solution, as I got covered in tyre sealant!

I also have a plan for tomorrow – all of Utah beach, a couple of museums which should be about 70km.