From Carteret to Barfleur

About 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Carteret, which I've been blogging about for a few days, is the village of Barfleur (pop. approx. 600). It's on the opposite coast from Barneville-Carteret. Barfleur is officially one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France. It's built around a beautiful harbor.

Here's a map:

As you can see, this area of Normandy, historically called le Cotentin and administratively le département de la Manche (la Manche  or "the sleeve" being the French name for what we call the English Channel), is a peninsula that juts out into the sea and is the western part of Normandy. The largest town in the area is Cherbourg, where ocean liners dock.

Above is a stitched-together panorama of the north shore of the Barfleur harbor. I took this set of photos in September 2004, the first time I ever visited the village. You can enlarge the image and scroll across it to see it at full size. Barfleur is famous as the port from which William the Conqueror, who was the Duke of Normandy, sailed to England in 1066. Richard Cœur de Lion (Richard the Lion-Heart) also sailed out of Barfleur when left France to take the throne of England.

Carteret beaches and scenes

This slideshow is made up of photos that I took on a clear, windy day in May 2005 at Carteret on the western Normandy coast. It is made up of 16 photos and takes 1m20s to view.

The show starts at the now disaffected train station. It shows Carteret's two churches, the post office, and the dog we lived with at the time. Collette was with us from 1992 until 2006, and she made the move from California at the age of 11. She always loved going to run at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and she enjoyed the broad sandy beaches at Carteret too.

The channel and boat basin at Carteret in Normandy

Our internet connection just came back from the dead, so I probably should post this as quickly as I can. I was in the middle of putting the post together when I realized I couldn't save it to Blogger. No internet connection. I tried an Android tablet, but the result was the same. Then it occurred me to check the telephone. No dial tone. Now it has all come back, but it's as slow as molasses running uphill.

Here are a few more May 2005 photos that I took on a trip up to Carteret in Normandy. The tide was really low (marée basse, or basse mer). The pattern in the mud or sand is pretty, as you'll see in the next couple of photos.

My friend Ginny in California, who grew up on what we call "the Jersey Shore" — the coast of New Jersey — recently left a comment about what it would be like to have such extreme differences between low tide and high tide. In New Jersey — note that it was Carterets, whose home was the Isle of Jersey, who named the 9state New Jersey back in the 1600s — the tides are about as they are in my native North Carolina, with a difference between mean low tide and mean high tide of only four to six feet.

This morning, before our internet conked out, I was reading a web page about the port at Carteret in France. It's called le port des Îles, because the islands of Jersey and Guernesey are just off the coast. I learned that the channel leading to the harbor at Carteret is open to boats for about 2½ hours before high tide until about 2½ hours after high tide (pleine mer). There's a published schedule. Today, for example, the port opens to boat traffic at about 7:30 a.m. and remains open until about 12:30 p.m. This evening it will be open from about 8:00 p.m. until about 1:00 a.m.

Here again is the channel leading into the boat basin at Carteret taken when the tide was higher (I took it in June 2004) You can see that it was a beautiful day. As I said, the difference in water level between high and low tide on this part of the Normandy coast is 25 to 35 feet, depending on the moon and the weather. Strong westerly winds can also push water up into the channel at Carteret.

And here it is again at low tide. This is what people on boats see as they navigate the channel up to the boat basin. By the way, there is also a town in New Jersey, USA, named Carteret (pop. 24,000). I've never been there, but I have been close. I don't know if it is as picturesque as the Normandy town of Carteret.

The good news right now is that our internet connection seems to be running normally again. I'm always so relieved when it comes back after just a short outage, and I don't have to call the phone company to ask what is going on and when it will be fixed. Anyway, this morning the phone was out too. But I could have called on a cell phone. I didn't have to.

Carteret : marée basse, marée haute

The village of Carteret, in western Normandy, is now part of a bigger town. It merged with the town of Barneville in 1965 to create a new municipality called Barneville-Carteret. This is a photo I took from in front of a hotel in Barneville where I stayed with my mother and her sister in September 2004. I wanted them to see Carteret, since both of them had lived since 1936 in Carteret County, North Carolina, in the U.S. — which is where my grandmother was born.

In the photo above you can see how wide the beaches at Barneville-Carteret are at low tide. The old village of Carteret was built on a rocky promontory that is called le Cap de Carteret. (There is a town in N.C. called Cape Carteret, founded in 1959.) In N.C., Carteret is pronounced [KAR-tuh-rit]; in France it's [kar-tuh-RAY], or [kar-TRAY].

When I was in Carteret in Normandy in June 2004, I saw the channel that leads to the port when the tide was sort of medium high. The water was very blue, and small boats were coming and going. I took the photo above looking westward toward the sea. By the way, the Carteret family originated on the Isle of Jersey, 15 miles off the Normandy coast, more than a thousand years ago.

I must have taken this photo of the channel and waterfront at Carteret from up near the lighthouse, which stands on the promontory you see if the first photo above, overlooking the sea. You can see how low the tide was. This was in May 2005, and I was looking eastward (inland).

Here's a photo of the phare de Carteret that I took in September 2004. The lighthouse is only 18 meters (59 ft.) tall, but it stands on high ground and the total elevation above sea level is 85 meters (275 ft.)

Compare the French Carteret lighthouse above to the lighthouse at Cape Lookout in Carteret County, North Carolina. The Lookout light is built on sand, basically at sea level, and stands 163 feet (about 50 meters) tall.