If you’ve been on a cruise this has probably happened to you: the cruise is advertised as taking you to several famous places which sounds great until you find out that at least one of these places you are actually going to drop anchor in a port that is a few hours away from that place. This is how we ended up visiting Le Havre, France for a day.

Last summer when we went on a Princess cruise to the British Isles. The last place advertised on the cruise was Paris/Normandy. The port of call for that day was actually Le Havre, a costal French town. It turns out that by car Le Havre is about three hours away from Paris and an hour and a half away from Normandy.

Those distances aren’t too bad if you feel ok about renting and driving a car in a foreign country. That is not a part of traveling we have tackled yet, and, having been to Paris before, we knew that traffic was not something we were going to want to drive in.

Of course the reason that cruise lines advertise Paris/Normandy when they are docking in Le Havre is because they want you to buy excursion packages from them. Everybody wants to visit Paris or Normandy, most people have never even heard of Le Havre.

Of course, we plan our trips in advance so we didn’t just show up in Le Havre and wonder where we were. But we had been unable to find a third party excursion with any openings from Le Havre to Normandy, and going to Paris seemed almost pointless as you would spend most of the day getting there and then back to the ship. Having already been in Paris the year before there was no reason to do that.

So What Do You Do?

Well we obviously like traveling, and when you travel you sometimes end up in places you weren’t expecting, or that aren’t you ideal destination. Almost always you can still find interesting things to do there. Le Havre is no exception to this. Looking online ahead of time we decided on few things we could do while we were here.

Our cruise line had a bus running from the docks into the city for those who were not going on excursions. So we took that in and started from there.

1. The Hanging Gardens

The first thing we did was to visit the hanging gardens which appear to be the most popular thing to visit in Le Havre according to the internet. We had to walk what seemed a very long way through the city, most of it uphill to get to the gardens.

When we first got there we were not sure we were in the right place, because you have to go inside this kind of wall and outside it looked like it was under construction or abandoned. But we had walked a long way, so we went in anyway.

Once inside we could find the entrance to the green houses which €2 to enter. These are interesting. They have a lot of exotic plants. They are probably more interesting if you are a hobby botanist.

Outside the green houses up on the wall are gardens that you can visit for free. These were actually more fun for us then the green houses. We especially liked the Rose Garden, which you have to go through a tunnel to get to. Near the tunnel is also a little cafe that served gelato, which of course we ate.

2. The Beach

Since Le Havre is a costal town the beach is of course an important destination. After we finished at the hanging gardens we made our way back to the beach. We were very hungry by this time having only had a small amount of gelato to sustain us since breakfast.

There are quite a few restaurants and snack stands along the beach in Le Havre. Unfortunately we don’t know French, and so we had a bit of an experience trying to get some food from one of these. Meagan is better at communicating in other languages than I am, so eventually she was able to get us some food, although I think we left the man there pretty frustrated.

After eating, and feeling much better, we went down to the beach. Unfortunately it is rocky, not a sandy beach. The locals apparently don’t mind this because they just lay out on the rocks likes its no problem. We weren’t as use to it, but we did sit on the beach for a while and play in the water a little.

3. The Library

If you have been following our British Isles adventures you know that we like to visit libraries. Well at least I do, and Meagan tolerates it. Le Harve happens to have a pretty new public library located not far from where the bus dropped us off. It is in a building known as the Volcano.

It was fun to see what the library here was like. I was quite impressed with their layout and setup. Of course we could not actually read anything that was there, but it was fun to look around.

The benefit of visiting libraries is of course that they have free internet in many places. Especially when you are on a cruise the internet is in very short supply, so we used the wifi here at the library for a while.

Sum Up

Le Havre is not a place we would choose to go visit on its own. But by the time we got there we had already been traveling for almost three weeks and seen a lot of amazing things. It was kind of nice to have a day where we didn’t feel a lot of pressure to see a ton of stuff.