Attack Of The Giant Snails

I know, the title of this post sounds like a 1950s horror movie, but more on that later. We're continuing to have a great time on the river cruise and can now officially highly recommend it to all of our friends. I'm writing this as we sit in our room after lunch waiting for the ship to start heading towards Paris. We'll be up on the top deck later watching the scenery go by...
So, today we are in a town called Caudebec-en-Caux. We arrived last night at about 10 and it looked like this:

Shortly after breakfast next morning, we were on the bus and off to the harbour town of Honfleur. It is a very pretty little town that is very, very popular with tourists. It's also famous to Canadians as the port from which Samuel de Champlain sailed to what would become Quebec. We spent the morning walking around, taking in the sights. The biggest challenge I'm finding is trying to take decent photos that are not full of hoards of tourists. In each place that we've been, Marilyn and I have gone away from the group at some point to get a more local view. 
We started off the tour looking at some of the smaller streets which are pretty much filled with shops and bistros.
This is a typical small street in Honfleur. 

One of the most common items sold in Normandy is Calvados. It's a type of brandy distilled from cider.  

Below are a couple of shots of the harbour area. It is pretty much surrounded by cafes and bistros.

They sell quite a bit of bottled food in some of the shops. We found way more bottled tripe than I ever want to see. These are some of the tamer items. 

Here's Marilyn checking out a French-guy sailor shirt that she thought I might want!! My answer was, Non! Non! Non!

We wandered around Honfleur before lunch and ended up at a big park for kids. Here Marilyn is in a Vegetation Boat made of shrubs and plants looking at a statue of Samuel de Champlain.

And now on to the giant snails. After wandering around the park and back into town, we found a nice bistro near the harbour. Let me preface lunch by saying that I had read in one of the Paris blogs before coming that everyone, at least once, will order something that they aren't sure of and will be surprised by the outcome. Honfleur is a seafood town so we had a formule lunch that included a seafood platter. A formule meal is basically a preset meal with a couple of choices for a set price. On the platter description there were two items that I couldn't decipher and the server wasn't speaking English or being overly helpful. When the platter arrived, there were some shimp, head on as is the custom here, a clam and 6 giant snails. I had ordered escargot previously and they were the nice little ones that we all know. These ones were giant by comparison. We had been given a number of little tools to deal with them so we plunged in. They were just steamed. I pulled the first one out, with a bit of a struggle, and put it into my mouth. When I tentatively bit down on it, there was a chewy part and a hard part. Had to fish the hard part out of my mouth. It was the little trap door that the snail uses to close itself in. It wasn't our best food of the trip. I won't even go into the slime part! If you ever see "bulots" on a menu, don't order them!!
Here you see the whole platter with the seaweed as a base. The bulots are lurking off to the side.

This is a close up of one of the bulot that Marilyn has extracted from its shell. 

We each had the mussells with fries that was on pretty much every menu.

Here is my odd dessert. I had ordered the cheese plate dessert and it came with a dressed salad. It was a fitting end to a rather odd meal.

Marilyn had a normal dessert of ice cream with a kumquat on top.