Vernon

Vernon exists in most people’s itineraries as a comma, not a sentence: the train station where you get off before the shuttle bus or the bike ride out to Monet’s gardens at Giverny, four kilometers upriver. We did that too, the first time. It was only on a second trip, deliberately staying the night in Vernon itself instead of pushing straight on, that I realized the town on the Seine deserved more than a platform and a bus stop.

The bridge that’s been broken since the war

The single image that sold me on Vernon is the Vieux-Moulin, a row of stone bridge piers standing out in the middle of the Seine, several of them still capped with the remains of a half-timbered watermill house that looks like it’s simply floating on the water. The bridge dates back to the medieval period and was rebuilt multiple times over the centuries, but the version we see today is essentially a ruin left in place: German forces partially destroyed it in June 1940, and Allied bombing damaged it further in 1944 during the push to liberate Normandy, and rather than fully rebuild the crossing, the town chose to leave the broken piers and the timber mill house standing as they are, a monument by omission. Monet himself painted this same bridge and mill repeatedly in the 1880s, well before either war touched it, and it’s strange to stand on the modern bridge just downstream and recognize his brushstrokes in the actual stone.

Getting lost in the half-timbered quarter

Vernon’s old town, tucked behind the riverfront around the Collégiale Notre-Dame, is a genuine surprise if you’ve only ever passed through on the Giverny shuttle: narrow lanes lined with leaning half-timbered houses, some dating to the 16th century, their upper floors jutting out over the pavement in that lopsided, slightly drunk way Norman half-timbering always seems to settle into after five hundred years. Lia and I wandered it for a couple of hours with no destination, ducked into a boulangerie on the Rue Carnot for what turned out to be an excellent kouign-amann, and ended up at a riverside table watching the late light hit the ruined mill house across the water, the same view painted a hundred and forty years earlier, minus the tourists on bicycles heading for Giverny.

When to go: Late spring through early autumn works best, both for the Seine-side light on the old mill and because it’s peak season for the Giverny bike path — an easy, flat ride you can do straight from Vernon’s own riverfront.