Day Trip out to St Helier, Jersey, UK

As we were meandering our way around the Normandy coast we saw brochures for ferry services from Normandy, France  to the Channel Isles, UK. There are services from a number of French ports to various channel islands eg to Jersey or Guernsey or  Alderney or Sark. We decided we would try and do a day trip to one of the Channel islands, which are UK territory.

As most of these French ports are tidal the sailing times and days vary quite abit. We decided on the small French port of Carteret which had a sailing enabling a day return to Jersey. The sailing time was only one hour. Interestingly Carteret was used for supply of the allied armies during the post D Day liberation of France. It was only used for about a week after liberation, mostly due to the issues with the tidal nature of the port and its small capacity. The tidal range is quite high and the port can today only be used for the ferries from mid to high tide.

St Helier town and Albert Pier aand yacht basin (photo 2028)

The passage to St Helier, the main port for Jersey went well for Dorothy and Gary but not for a little French girl who was sitting next to Gary, she was quite sick during the voyage. We were welcomed to the UK by an English lass who wanted to know how long we intended to stay in the UK and why we were entering the UK. Once those questions had been satisfactorily answered we were “given leave to enter the UK” for six months.

St Helier is quite a mix of new construction along the promenade with a Victorian era pier and wharf. We visited the tourist bureau and decided to take a walking tour of some of the WWII German defences. This involved taking a bus to Portelet and meeting the guide there. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so we embarked on a bus ride on Jersey “My Bus” operated by Connex. As in Melbourne, the Connex service was late but we still made the start of the tour, especially as we were the only ones to turn up! The weather was not to kind to us either, it rained heavily for about 15 minutes whilst we were walking to the German command bunker.  Once inside the guide was full of details about the daily routine of the German troops.  The bunker only survived intact because it was filled in with earth after the war, volunteers began restoration in the 70's.

Parish church of St Helier (Photo2027)

Afterward we visited the village of St Aubin where we had a very nice café lunch out of the rain. St Aubin is still basically a 19^th century British village and much more what we expected than St Helier.

St Helier re-opened central town police station (Photo2020)

Our day out to Jersey was quite pleasant, it was nice to hear English being spoken by the great majority of the people in the streets! Our return trip was uneventful, Gary even managed to catch up on some missing sleep time.