Trips, Pics, and Tales

As so often does, life gets a bit crazy busy and time goes by a bit too quickly!  With school starting for my kids, and a few other trips between the last time I posted and now, I'm just finding the time to return to sharing the story from my Avalon River Cruise back in June!  Thanks for hanging in there!  We left off after a day in Normandy, enjoying Calvados and other treats!  Today, we're heading to Rouen! We had a slightly later start so I finally took a few pictures around our ship that I want to share!  We were on the Avalon Tapestry II, which is one of the Suite Ships with many of the cabins having the Wall to Wall Panoramic Windows.   There is a nice lounge area in the back of the ship that always seemed to have snacks out.  In the morning, pastries and at night maybe cookies. Also a nice area with a TV, some books and games, and just a nice social area with lots of windows to see the beautiful views! Carol is all read...

After our freshly prepared lunch and stroll around town, we met up with our group again and moved on to our last stop of the day.  We would be visiting a Calvados distillery.  This region of France is the only region where no wine is grown, it's actually too wet for the grapes to grow to produce good wine.  So, when good wine can't be made, the next best thing is to make Calvados! Calvados is made from apples and is a cider type brandy.  It ranges from a lighter cider to a Pommeau drink to a much stronger reserve that is aged longer. There are approximately 200 Calvados producers in the Normandy region who bottle and sell their Calvados, and they all have to follow the Appellations for Calvedos.  We visited the Pierre Huet distillery. Our guide started by showing us the process from beginning to end and explaining how the Calvados products are made, starting from the apples, or sometimes pears. This is the machine that presses the fr...