Honeymoon Notebook, 1999
Travel in the before times
A prompt in a travel writing workshop with Caravan Writers Collective sent me looking for, and finding, a notebook I kept while we hiked the coast of Brittany on our honeymoon in July 1999.
A young friend recently told me that she has no frame of reference for what the US is going through right now. She’s part of a whole generation that’s never boarded a plane without taking their shoes off. For those who never knew, and for those who might have forgotten, this is what travel was like in the before times.
Saturday, July 17
Got married
We married on our back deck in 100-degree New Jersey heat surrounded by friends and family. We’d known each other a whole seven months.
Sunday, July 18
Woke in NYC at the Paramount Hotel (a boutique hotel on 46th St, famous at the time from the closing credits of Saturday Night Live.) Breakfast at the Brooklyn Diner, train back to NJ. Limo to the airport, which turned out to be a stretch. Nice. Flight to London was 3 1/2 hours late leaving.
Some things haven’t changed, like flight delays at Newark Airport. But security has. There was an Xray scanner for hand luggage and a metal detector, but no limits on liquids, no removal of coats, belts, or shoes, anyone could walk down to the gate, and the main concern with an unattended bag was that someone would steal it!
Monday, July 19
Arrived Gatwick 2 1/2 hours late, train to Portsmouth Harbour, walked past Portsmouth Grammar School.
“PGS” was the all-boys school for the next generation of imperial overlords where I spent my teen years. Britain had lost most of its empire during or after the second world war, but generations too young to remember it act today as if they still have it.
Strange walking past PGS 30 years later with my wife on our honeymoon. Wonder what I’ll be doing in another 30 years?
Writing about it, apparently!
Ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo. Good meal on board. Good Chablis. Brenda looked at me and said, “We’re fucking married!”
And we still are!
Portsmouth was the departure point for the D-Day landings; I remember celebrating the 25th anniversary at my high school there. The Navy harbor that once sent to the French coast British and American warships and landing craft to defeat fascism was now sending car ferries, unaware of how soon, or where, fascism would return.
Tuesday, July 20
Arrived St. Malo 8:30. Warm, sunny intervals, moderate wind. Coffee & croissant in the Old Town. Ferry to Dinard. Walked to St. Briac. (13 miles?) Beautiful scenery. Pretty town. Could live here. French holding up pretty well. Hotel de la Houle 2 nights f380 ($60) per night.
Could live here. Could live here. And we could have, then, as I had in Holland for six years. We were in France between the UK joining the EU in 1973 and the Brexit vote in 2016, still the most stunning act of national self-harm I’ve seen in my lifetime. My ability to live anywhere in the EU snuffed out by Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.
Hotel de la Houle 2 nights f380 ($60) per night. The Euro had arrived six days earlier, on July 14th, Bastille Day in France. The UK, of course, declined to join. Prices were marked in both French Francs and Euros, but most people were still paying in Francs. That hotel? It’s still there, now with a web site!
Wednesday, July 21
Cloudy, breezy, cool. Got up a little later. Walked into town for coffee, postcards, brioche tressée.
There was no Instagram, so snail mail postcards were the way. Weather is here, wish you were lovely.
12:00 still cloudy. Walked to Lancieux. Crepe for lunch - delicious. Walked back... St Briac is a v. pretty town... Every town has a boulangerie, boucherie/charcuterie, tabac, creperie, libraire, mairie,... and they mostly close for lunch!
Rural France was hanging in there, but soon the boucherie might only be open three days a week, then a mobile van once a week, then nothing. The supermarkets in the larger towns were starting to pull business away.
Crepe bretonne - sausage, cheese, egg, champignons… Back to beach, then bar for drinks... Creperie for dessert. Crepe normande - apples, creme fraiche - delicious.
Brittany is crepe country!
Thursday, July 22
Woke at 8, Brenda 8:45. Coffee & croissant at hotel. Walked out through town. Picked up peaches & quiches. Walked through beaches, cliffs, dunes, marsh, forest, and road. Ate quiche on the way. Checked in to the hotel at 3:00. Hotel le Vieux Moulin (Saint-Jacut-De-La-Mer)- very cute - stone.
The hotel, Le Vieux Moulin, The Old Mill, was a flour mill from 1415 until 1918. It’s been witness to countless wars and revolutions, including at least two wars-to-end-all-wars, and has endured them all.
Francis Fukuyama had recently written that humanity had reached:
"not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama, 1992
It certainly felt that way to us at the time. We were falling in love at the end of history in a world between walls; after the fall of Berlin wall, built to keep people in, and before the building of the border wall, built to keep people out.
The Old Mill smiled, and said nothing.
Friday, July 23
… Best breakfast yet. On the road at 10. Market in town. Bought t-shirt (Brenda), quiche, nectarines. Walked to St Cast. Past castle, beaches, headlands. Stopped on a beach to swim and bronze.
It would be another 20 years before I’d find the notebook my grandfather kept during his walk through France, a march, starting on Armistice Day, 1918, from France through Belgium to the Rhine in Germany, that I wrote about here: Armistice Day, 1918. It’s uncanny that we had the same note style:
Started our march to the Rhine from Sailly au Bois on Nov 16th, 1918, and were at Surfontaine (Belgium) on Nov 17th.
although his handwriting was much better!
Arr St Cast 4:45. Booked hotel for tomorrow at Pléhérel-plage... Sat outside and had a cider (Cidre bouché de Bretagne - brut - Les Courtils de Montchevron).
Brittany is cider country!
That cider was so good—and it’s still there!
We usually booked the following night’s accommodation each afternoon, but that is as far as we planned ahead, a degree of freedom I’m not sure that would work today. We were hiking the GR34, Sentier des Douaniers, Customs Officers’ Path, one of many Grande Randonnées, the long-distance footpaths in France. No Google maps, no GPS, just a Michelin map, a guidebook, and the signposts like the one above.
Unlike long distance paths in the US such as the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail, these are not wilderness trails. They go from town to town with these close enough to find a comfortable bed each night. Many of the hotels and restaurants we slept and ate in are still there, at least in the smaller towns. It makes for lighter travel—no tent, no sleeping bag.
We were dropping into a tradition of travel on foot that goes back millennia, along the same coastal paths, the same mountain passes, stopping in the same towns, at the same inns and hotels that travelers have used for centuries and longer. We were falling in love with moving through landscape and time at a human pace.
Saturday, July 24
One week anniversary! Breakfast in front of the hotel… Bought bread in town (cinq cereales). Weather beautiful…
At home, we’d recently graduated to cell phones, but at that time US phones wouldn’t work on European networks. Making a call meant you had to buy a phone card for, say, 200 Francs at a Tabac, and then find a pay phone. You’d dial an access number, then enter the card number, and finally the number you were trying to call, maybe 30 digits in all, and if you got one wrong, it was back to the beginning! But hey, at least no one could demand to see five years of your social media history.
Anniversary dinner… 3 hrs. Delicious! Outside on terrasse. Dutch & German. Bed at 11-12.
We met people from The Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and Denmark on the trail. All at the time were members of the EU, although the UK was never quite as committed. The thing that bound the countries in Continental Europe together was their common experience during WWII; none of them came out of it uncompromised, and all had to do some soul-searching. France, The Netherlands, and Denmark were all at least partially occupied, and many people collaborated with the Germans, some out of sympathy or cowardice, some out of necessity.
Necessity? Let me give you an example. One of my favorite Dutch writers is the late Harry Mulisch. He grew up in the Netherlands during the war with an Austro-Hungarian father and a Jewish mother. His father collaborated to keep Harry and his mother safe. If you were Harry’s father, what would you have done? No right answer.
Continental European counties had a hard look in the mirror, didn’t like what they saw, and decided to do something about it. Germany went through a period of penance bordering on self-flagellation over the war in general and the holocaust in particular. Others went through their own dark night of the soul as they struggled to reconcile resistance and collaboration. All came to realize that evil is a human characteristic, not a national trait, and that unity and strengthened institutions were the best defense.
Meanwhile, the UK and US have yet to come to terms with their own histories of empire, slavery, and indigenous genocide1. History is not encouraging on what it will take for us to learn that lesson, though learned it must be if we are to move on; because simply going back to an earlier point on the same path will lead us right back to where we are today.
Sunday, July 25
…Walked at 9... Carried on to nude beach in Erquy - spent 3 hrs there! Walked on to Erquy. Had a crepe with andouille and cider. Decided to go on to Val Andre - another 2 1/2 hours.
Swam nude on the beach. Guys playing petanque... Most people not in shape.
The trail crossed a beach, the one in the picture, a couple of miles wide. About halfway across, we realized that we were the only people wearing clothes. When in France…
Hotel du Casino - no credit cards - F315 - nice room. A little sunburnt today. Must change money tomorrow. Went out for a beer in some bar. V. tired... hurt everywhere.
We unfortunately got a little sunburned in places where the sun does not ordinarily shine.
It’s possible today to travel to another country without ever handling cash. Not so back then, as many places still didn’t take credit cards, although we could use them to get cash from an ATM. I still have a bag full of pre-Euro currency, Francs, Marks, Pesetas, and more.
Monday, July 26
.... Walked to Pléneuf to bank. Did other shopping at Val Andre. Postcards, fruit, bread (delicious) and quiche. .... Walked to Hillion… Nice trail… Hips sore (sunburn). Hotel a dump. Fixed price dinner - F60 - not bad. Hors d’oeuvres, steak, cheese, dessert muscadet sur lie. People v. friendly. Nothing else open in town. Weather sunny but very windy.
A dump is harsh. Hillion is a village rather than a town and was already going the way of villages across France - slowly dying. This hotel was a small family business. The family was eating dinner next to us, the only guests; the daughter would get up from her meal to wait on us. The hotel is gone now.
Tuesday, July 27
... Walked to Yffiniac ... Walked to St Brieuc.
Nothing to stay for, so hopped a train to Paris. Express to Rennes, TGV to Paris... St Brieuc a bit of an anticlimax…
After a week of walking along coastlines and through small towns, even a small city like St Brieuc was large enough to break the spell. Our hike was over and it was time to move on. We spent a couple of days in Paris, took a day trip to Normandy, and returned to London by train through the Channel Tunnel, a link that promised a permanent connection of the UK to continental Europe.
I hope one day it will live up to that promise.
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Most European countries still have much more to do on this front.
This is awesome. Peaches, quiches, and beaches. I enjoyed your double narration from both time point perspectives.
Such a memory goldmine, John! You must be pleased to have kept your careful records. Those together with the photos of your handsome younger selves are priceless.
What stood out for me? So many delicious food options (the bread photo!). Fukuyama's missed mark. (The Old Mill smiled, and said nothing.) The story of Harry Mulisch (I've wondered more than once what I would have done. The relevance today is overwhelming.) The sunburn!
You must look back on this time with such fondness.