Friday April 3, 2026. Sailing to Vernon France

By Ellen Outten

Slept in until 8:30 this morning!  It felt great.   We sailed overnight from Paris to Le Roche-Guyon docking at 5:30 this morning.  It’s a small town of approximately 450 people and we walked right off the ship and around town.  As you would expect it is not much of a town, but we managed to find a chocolatier and improved the economy a bit.  Dark chocolate, my favorite.  


Yes Dennis. We really are in Paris and not on some Caribbean island.

We wandered through this small village of 450 people 







This way to the chocolate shop 


We had lunch on the ship while we sailed up the Seine and enjoyed the passing scenery.

That’s right. Two desserts

At 3 pm we have a bus ride to the Monet gardens and home at Giverny   It will allow us to walk off lunch!  Right!

The rest of today, our tour of Giverney, is just a profusion of color and flowers.  Of course I had no idea this was here or what our excursion was about.  

Our excursion took us to where Monet lived and painted for  43 years.  He was inspired by his gardens and spent years transforming them, planting thousands of flowers.  He believed it was important to surround himself with nature and paint outdoors.  He created many paintings of his house and gardens especially of water Lillie’s in the pond, the Japanese bridge and a weeping willow tree.  

The flowers were so much brighter in this gray day with a bit of a misty rain.   I have seen many gardens but today surpassed all I’ve seen.    So what follows is a lot of pictures of flowers.   The colors in person were amazing. No two pictures are of the same flowers.  The garden was over three acres of color.

A sea of red Viking umbrellas heading to the garden.


































We were back on the ship at 6:15 pm.  Dinner was at 7 pm and tonight, the theme was A Taste Of Normandy.  It was buffet and while I prefer a plated sit down meal, everything was delicious.  Lots of voices in starters, mains and of course desserts.  We sat with four new people and everyone we’ve sat with so far have been pleasant and enjoyable to share a meal with.

Another late start tomorrow!  Our tour is at 1:45 pm , the included Rouen Walkout Tour.  We sail all morning.  

11,578 steps today including a bunch of stairs.  My feet and knee are up and I’m glad !  




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