It is somewhat cruel to consider Rouen as an Industrial city and Tours as one for tourists. Both have old towns and large impressive cathedrals. It seems to be an impression wrongly built up within my family over the decades with Rouen being little more than a pass through to else where, or the host for a drunken camping trip when I was a young student. There are differences though.

Setting off this morning I finally found how to force the car to avoid toll roads with the sat nav. Obvious when you know how, but not the most intuitive at the start. It was always going to be a long journey, but fortunately we stumbled across the E.Leclerc shopping centre near Barjouville. It was the perfect timing for lunch at Flunch, a wander round the very large hyper market, and some clothes shopping (not by me I should hasten to add).

It was a good job we spotted the above centre as both before and after there was little alternative for a lunch stop. I’m not sure if it is due to the traditional ‘closed for August’ situation of most northern French cities, or just a sad result of population migrations, but many of the villages we drove through appeared to be dead or near dead. It is when you see long closed hotels and tabacs that you get a bad feeling about the situation.

Next stop, several hours later, was the same charger we had used on the way to La Coquille. While this will mean little to most of you, we were just using the Ionity network as I get a large Europe wide discount and they are also some of the fastest out there. All the other chargers we have used I’ve seen charge rates of over 200kW, peaking for periods at 235kW. This is a lot. However with this one here I struggled to see 150kW from the same type of charger.

The weather had been hinting at rain since lunch time and now we saw the results as we got close to Rouen. It had obviously been raining heavily though there seemed to be a pause as we approached. Arriving at our hotel for the evening, Hotel Mercure Centre Champ De Mars, we found it had an underground car park (not free alas), however as we started down we found it had not been updated (quite possibly not possible) for at least 40 years aside from a paint job as it was near impossible to get round each bend without having to back up, adjust angle, and retry. Parking was even worse and some of the ‘double spots’ were a no go as the cars parked there had obviously given up and parked across two spaces. I suspect back in the 1970s, when cares were a lot smaller and thinner, this car park would have been easy to navigate.

After a break it was time to head out for food, dodging the rain at the same time. The hotel was not far from the cathedral and this is one thing that does make Rouen different from Tours. The latter is very touristy and the restaurants cater with that respect, where as with Rouen it is more of a food centre, with far better restaurants. We had a superb meal in the covered court yard of Cafe Hamlet, a place I thoroughly recommend, though we did get the last free table. Close call. I should also mention it was my mother’s birthday, so the excellent meal worked well (and meant it was not a double bust considering the meal on my birthday).

Post the meal a digestive back at the hotel then we retired at the end of day 8.