Normandy

I arrived in Normandy on a Tuesday in October, driving north from Paris with the radio off. The sky closed in somewhere around Rouen — that flat, pewter light that feels nothing like the south — and by the time I reached the coast near Étretat the wind was cutting straight off the Channel. There was no one else on the clifftop path. The chalk arches dropped straight into the sea below, prehistoric and completely indifferent to my presence. I had been living in Mexico for two years at that point. Standing there, I felt something I had almost forgotten: actual cold.

Normandy is one of those places where the landscape does something to you before you have had time to form an opinion about it. The coastline alone could keep you occupied for days — the Alabaster Coast’s white cliffs running north toward Fécamp, the wild dunes at Utah Beach, the tidal drama of Mont-Saint-Michel at dawn before any buses arrive. But what surprised me most was the interior: bocage countryside stitched together with hedgerows, half-timbered farmhouses, apple orchards so dense you can smell the fermentation in autumn. This is where calvados comes from, and the cider that pairs better with a plateau de fruits de mer than any white wine you might reach for. I sat in a ferme-auberge outside Cambremer one evening eating a local Livarot cheese that was aggressively ripe, drinking a brut cidre from a ceramic jug, and thought: this is a completely different France from the one in the postcards.

The D-Day sites require a separate reckoning. I am not someone who typically seeks out war memorials, but Normandy makes it impossible to look away. The American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer is one of the most quietly devastating places I have ever stood — not because of its scale, though the scale is staggering, but because of its precision. Row after row of white crosses and Stars of David, each one a specific person, facing west toward a home they did not return to. You leave changed. The town of Bayeux nearby, home to the tapestry, makes for a necessary exhale: half-timbered, cathedral-shadowed, utterly intact after a war that destroyed so much around it.

When to go: September and October are the best months. The summer crowds thin, the apple harvest begins, and the light turns melancholic in ways that suit the landscape. May and June are also excellent — long days, wildflowers along the cliff paths, and the commemorations around June 6th if you want to witness the region at its most solemn and purposeful. Avoid August in coastal towns like Étretat and Honfleur, which become genuinely unnavigable.

What most guides get wrong: They reduce Normandy to D-Day and a quick look at Mont-Saint-Michel, then move on. That misses almost everything. The cheese route, the cider circuit, the medieval abbeys, the fishing ports where you can eat oysters at 9am looking out at working boats — these are what make Normandy irreplaceable. It is also one of the few parts of France where the food and drink are completely indigenous: calvados, camembert, teurgoule, mussels from the bay, cream in everything. You do not eat like this anywhere else in the country.