Normandy

Normandy is where France turns its face to the English Channel and becomes something quieter, greener, and more melancholy than the south. The light here is different — softer, filtered through clouds that roll in from the Atlantic, shifting minute by minute in ways that drove Monet to set up his easel at Étretat and Honfleur and paint the same scene forty times because it was never the same scene twice. I grew up close enough to visit on weekends, and Normandy was the first place that taught me that France is not one country but many.

The Côte d’Albâtre — the Alabaster Coast — is where the chalk cliffs drop vertically into the sea. Étretat, with its natural arches and its needle rock, is the postcard image, and it deserves every photograph ever taken of it. But walk the cliff path north toward Fécamp and you will find yourself alone with the seabirds and the wind and a landscape that makes you understand why the Normans built their boats and left. There is something about this coast that simultaneously invites you to stay and dares you to depart.

Mont-Saint-Michel is the most visited site in France outside Paris, and even the crowds cannot diminish it. The abbey sits on a granite island in a bay where the tides are among the most extreme in Europe — the sea retreats kilometers and returns at the speed of a galloping horse, or so the old claim goes. I have been three times. Each time, I climbed the narrow medieval streets to the abbey church at the summit and stood in the cloister looking out at the bay, and each time I found it impossible to believe that human beings built this. The engineering is medieval. The ambition is not.

The D-Day beaches — Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold, Sword — are a different kind of experience entirely. I first visited with my grandfather, who had his own complicated feelings about what happened here in June 1944. The American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer is 9,387 white crosses on a bluff above Omaha Beach, arranged with a geometric precision that makes the scale of the loss legible in a way that numbers alone cannot. It is quiet there. Visitors speak softly, or not at all. The beach below is wide and flat and looks ordinary, and the gap between what you see and what you know happened there is the entire point.

Honfleur is the prettiest harbor town in northern France, with a Vieux Bassin lined by tall, narrow houses that Boudin and Monet painted and that still look exactly as they painted them. The seafood restaurants along the quay serve moules-frites and sole meunière. The Côte Fleurie stretches east toward Deauville and Trouville — twin resort towns separated by a river and a class distinction that the French find endlessly amusing.

When to go: May to September for the best weather, though Normandy is beautiful in the rain. The D-Day anniversary on June 6 brings ceremonies and crowds. September has the apple harvest and the beginning of cider season.