Three days in Étretat

Three days in Étretat, Normandy, and the best parts were the slow ones. We arrived on a Sunday evening and walked straight to the water before doing anything else, because the cliffs do not really let you start with something sensible.

There are two of them holding the town between them, the Aval side with the famous needle and arches, and the Amont side most people skip, and their names simply mean downstream and upstream, as if the sea were a river. So the days found their rhythm, the quiet Amont side before lunch, the town around five, the pebbles again by nine because the sunset kept asking us to stay.

Somewhere in there we lost the Belgian national day to a French cliff, and honestly, fair trade. One of us spent all three days behind the camera, and somewhere around slide seventeen there is proof that we occasionally put it down. The small things stay the longest, the rattle of the waves dragging the pebbles back out, the gulls that own every railing, a full hour of sitting still while the light improved on its own.

That white needle in the first photo, Maurice Leblanc wrote it hollow and full of royal treasure in 1909, and this town has been playing along ever since. If you walk the beach past the arches, check the tide first, the passages flood on the rise.

Save this for a slow few days by the sea, and bring someone who does not mind sitting still. The gardens up on the cliff get a diary of their own.

And tell us below, what is the last place that made you sit still for a whole hour?