Some foods are best photographed as they are being made.  When I see a street vendor selling crepes, I have to stop and take out my camera.  In the photo (left), George has caught me in the act at an outdoor market in Honfleur. I was hoping to get a shot of the crepe in mid-air.  While George was thinking the lovely sausage wrapped in a crepe would be lunch.  Since neither happened, we’re bound to repeat this scenario again.

Later that day we walked up the hill to the newly constructed Eugene Boudin Art Museum. Among the small displays in one  galleries were Boudin’s breathtaking studies of the sky.  These were not sketches finished in the studio.  Their luminosity conveys the excitement of an artist painting en pleine aire.

Art history textbooks mention Boudin as one of the first French artists to paint out-of-doors.  But the paintings most of us see - static beach scene peopled by well-dressed citizens in their Sunday finery - don't convey the immediacy of an outdoor setting.  You have to visit this museum in Honfleur to sense the artist in discovery mode.

Eugene Boudin’s role as mentor to Claude Monet is also underplayed in history books.  Monet grew up in the nearby port of Le Havre and was in his teens drawing clever caricatures when he met Boudin in Paris.  The older artist convinced him to paint with him outdoors in Honfleur.  Monet was converted and continued to paint outdoors. A decade later he exhibited a misty harbor scene with the title: “Impression: Sunrise”.  Art critics ridiculed the painting and referred to Monet and his friends disparagingly as “impressionists”.  The name stuck.

Before leaving Normandy, we paid our respects to the deserted beaches where Allied invasion forces landed on June 6, 1944. I snapped a row of empty bathhouses at Sword Beach They had recently sheltered bathers but now stood like ghostly sentries facing the sea.  A monument honors the five hundred British and Canadian troops who landed on this, the narrowest and most easterly invasion beach.  Next to it is a nondescript building from which the enemy killed over two dozen men within minutes of their coming ashore. It's standing, as if nothing had ever had happened.

Rather than stay in a hotel along the coast, I booked a room in a small auberge near Honfleur.  I succumbed to a weakness for travel descriptions that include apple trees, trout streams and fine dining.  It sounded too good to be true.

I might have guessed the inn would have only one picturesque apple tree and a pond containing trout the size of torpedos. They turned out to be pets, not dinner. The inn’s kitchen did live up to its advertising producing copious breakfasts and an excellent prix-fixe dinner every night.  Our room was small and spare with enough modern touches to make it comfortable.  (I’ll be happy to share the name and address if you are interested.)

I can’t resist showing you one grisly fish picture taken at the Honfleur harbor market.  I was disappointed by the limited quantities of fish on display at markets in Honfleur and Trouville. Where were all the monsters of the deep I had expected to see? I suspect they were on their way to Rungis, the central market in Paris.  We would find them on menus when we returned.