Cherbourg - Day 1

We arrived yesterday evening in Cherbourg after a long day of travel. Owen drove us to the airport on Tuesday evening, along with our 3 huge bags to check and 4 carry-ons. We had no problems at the airport (some of you may know of our last minute ticketing woes...) and chilled for a few hours in the Lufthansa lounge (Katy scored business class tickets - well, la-dee-da!). The flight to Zurich was great in business class - we could actually sleep. The transfer in Zurich went smoothly, and we arrived in Paris in the early afternoon.

After a brief panic at the airport (I managed to leave a carry-on, containing my precious concertina, at baggage claim...), we were soon driving a rental car through the French countryside. We arrived in Cherbourg around 8PM (2AM human body time...) and found our apartment.

The

The host couple is very nice, and they left us with some starter food and drink. After a bit of initial unpacking, we hit the sack.

This morning (Thursday) we did more unpacking and figured out how to make the apartment work for us. We then headed over to the boatyard to meet with Kevin (the SwiftSure representative in France) and get a first look at the boat.

The walk to the yard takes us past the central harbor in Cherbourg.

This was about mid-tide; I'll try to get shots of high and low tide soon, to show off the astounding (to us Cape people...) tidal swing. 

The boat is in the main construction building at the Garcia/Allures yard.

She is very much still a work in progress, but she looks like a boat!

Kevin then took us out in the yard and showed us GX24, the boat built just ahead of ours, and launched this fall. It's now hauled out after its initial trials.

It's a purty thang, isn't it?

After lunch and more discussions at the yard with Garcia, we took off in the car to do some shopping. 

We bought very mundane stuff: some food (fruit, cereal, yogurt, milk, bread, cheese), a couple of pillows and pillowcases, some light bulbs, and extension cord, etc. But shopping was fun. reading labels in French was good for us, and we saw some entertaining goodies in the big "everything" store:

Need some PJs?

Or maybe some yogurt?

After shopping we didn't have enough time to go back to the apartment before meeting Kevin at a sneak preview of the program his SO's circus group is putting on. No photos or video, but it was fantastic.

The back to the apartment for a quick dinner, a little more organizing, and this blog post.