British Isles Tour - Day Five St. Peter Port, Guernsey Island

Today, we stopped at Guernsey Island.  What a treasure island this turned out to be!  Although we weren't on a formal tour, we took the city bus for only 2 pounds each, and this took us around the entire island in about an hour and a half.  It is only 6 miles long and 3 miles wide.

 Coming into the harbor, we knew this was going to be a unique experience.

Since the port was so small, we had to be "tendered" in by using a small boat from the cruise ship.

 George was reading up to find the best place to start.

We took off walking through the little town at St. Peter's Port.

I don't know when I've seen a cleaner, more picturesque city--or country as a whole.

The place where we caught the city bus was right in front of the marina.

Upon boarding the bus, we were able to see Napoleonic towers built to defend against the threat of French invasion . .



 as well as concrete bunkers from World War II.  These were built by the Germans who occupied St. Peter Port for five years.  Although the citizens on the island tried to carry on their lives as before, it was much like living in a large prison camp with 13,000 German guards.  However, Hitler's idea was to invade the mainland Britain, and this was the first step in doing so.  The country is still filled with bunkers, watchtowers, underground hospitals, gun emplacements and anti-tank defenses.

However, everywhere we looked, everything was so tidy and in such good order today.




Since we went around the edge of the island, we were near the beautiful blue water the whole time.




 


After seeing the entire island in about an hour and a half, the guys all wanted to go to the Traveler Station to check e-mails, but we three girls wanted to see more, so they went one way and we went another.


 I took one last picture of them before they left.  On this island, the phone booths were yellow!

We first went to the Town Church which overlooks the harbor.  It was first mentioned in 1048 but completed in 1475.
 






Inside, we found beautiful stained glass windows, as well as a place where the women of the church were having a little social.


I found this particularly interesting.  In both Matthew 3:16 where it says:  "And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water . . ." and in Mark 1:10 it says "and straightway coming up out of the water," and yet here is Jesus standing only ankle deep in the water with John sprinkling water on his head.  I found it fascinating how other religions look at baptism.

After visiting the beautiful church, we took off for the shopping area of the little Guernsey Island.  This little town had cobblestone streets and was called High Street.

Guernsey Islands are, also, ruled by Queen Elizabeth, so there was much excitement about the Royal Baby there, too.

We knew that Victor Hugo's home was on this island, so we set off to find it.  We found a very nice young man who told us how to get there.

 He told us it was quite a ways up the steep hills, but we didn't care.  We just took off to find it.

 On our way to Hugo's house, we met the author of several books written about the German occupation of Guernsey.  Her name is Molly Bihet, and she could definitely write in the first person as she was there as a child during those five years.

 More than 19,000 islanders decided to leave before the Germans arrive, and many Guernsey schoolchildren spent the war years at schools around the country.  However 24,000 people stayed, believing that the occupation would be short lived.  They tried to carry on their lives as before, but it was difficult with 13,000 Germans occupying this tiny island.

 There were few examples of outright brutality, although dozens of islanders were deported to internment camps and concentration camps for real or imagined crimes against the German occupiers.


By the end of the war, food became extremely scarce, even though islanders exercised great ingenuity in using what was available.  Widespread starvation was only avoided by the arrival of a Red Cross ship, Vega, with desperately needed supplies.

 
The arrival of the British troops on Liberation Day was a very happy day, with thousands of people lining their route, wildly waving the "Union Jack" flag.

A monument was placed on the island in 2005 to commemorate that eventful day that the Guernsey Islands were now free of the German forces.  This was all so interesting to us, and her books will be a definite read in the future.

We continued our route to find Victor Hugo's house.

When we finally arrived at his home, we understood that you had to have a ticket for a certain time, and we wouldn't have time to go inside Victor Hugo's home known as "Hauteville House," but we were welcome to tour his gardens.

Victor Hugo bought this house in 1856 with the proceeds of his collection of poems.  Hugo was at first a devout Catholic and Royalist in France.  "Although he never lost his belief in God, he later became severely critical of the Church, believing it to be seriously failing the poor and the downtrodden--with whom he strongly empathized their cause most famously in Les Miserables."
 
 The gardens behind the house were just beautiful and peaceful.  Victor Hugo opposed capital punishment and spoke against it in the upper house after being elected to the French peerage in 1841.  By the time Louis Napoleon seized absolute power in 1851, Hugo was one of the Emperor's greatest critics.  



 For political reasons, Hugo went into exile, first to Belgium, then Jersey, and finally to Guernsey--the one place not to expel him.  In exile Hugo continued to produce work critical of the Second Empire.  

From the back of the house, you can see how Hugo had many windows facing over the beautiful gardens and on clear days could look out across the islands and see France's Cotentin Peninsula. 
 
The beautiful English Channel that Hugo overlooked.

From his lookout at the top, Hugo completed "LeMiserables (17 years in the writing and published in 1862) and many other works.


After Napoleon the third was deposed, Hugo returned to Paris from here and was elected to the National Assembly and the Senate.  When he died at age 83, he was revered as a hero of the Republic and a great man of letters.  More than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon where he was buried.

You could even see our cruise ship from over his garden wall.

After out wonderful visit of Hauteville House, we started on our way back--much easier downhill than up!

 

Interesting smoke stacks and chimneys on many of the houses.  

When we finally got back to the area by the dock, we were so glad we had ventured out and had seen all that we did.  I will forever remember my day at Guernsey--now it will be more than just the wonderful "Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" book that I read awhile back.  It really makes all the events in that book live for me.

Back at the ship, it was our first formal night, and then we went to a wonderful evening show called, "Celebrate the World."

Tomorrow's stop:  Cork (Ringaskiddy), Ireland