Channel Islands - Jersey & Guernsey

Royal Bay & Mont Orgueil Castle
 - Jersey, Channel Islands

Pat with Our Hosts (Noelia & Annelise)
 - Jersey, Channel Island

Channel Islands - Jersey & Guernsey (6/26-29/2011) 

The Channel Islands are a very interesting and fun destination. Friendship dominated our visit.

The Channel Islands are located in the English Channel about 40 miles northwest of France. They are self governing and although closely linked to the United Kingdom for foreign policy and defense, the Channel Islands are considered a separate jurisdiction. 

Saint Peters - Guernsey, Channel Islands

We visited two of the four Channel Islands starting with Jersey. With a population of about 90,000, Jersey is a beautiful island and is famous for it modest climate, offshore finance, the Jersey Cow, and creamy dairy products (the ice cream is great!). About 30% of population is concentrated in Jersey’s capital, Saint Helier, where we stayed arriving by ferry from France.

Sunset - Jersey, Channel Islands

They Love Their Jersey Cows
- Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands

Jersey's Saint Helier is a very pretty Channel Islands town with flowers everywhere and all quite British. It is large enough to act like a small city but small enough that a lot of people know each other. 

We wandered Saint Helier's shopping areas, open market, and had lunches of crab sandwiches and fish and chips – all quite British.

Lunch of Fish & Chips 
and Creamy Peas
at Hector's - Saint Helier,
Jersey, Channel Island

Because the Channel Islands has no capital gains tax and other benefits, offshore finance is huge here creating high earnings and with Jersey’s mild climate, it is a sought-out place to live and housing prices have sky rocketed.

We also took a day trip by ferry to Saint Peters on the neighboring Guernsey Island of the Channel Islands, famous for the setting of the book Potato Peel Pie Society about the harsh German occupation of Guernsey Island and the Channel Islands during WWII.

Friendship is the theme that dominated our visit to the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. We went to see our friends Noelia, who was our perfect host and showed us around her beautiful island of Jersey for 4 days, and Annelise, who came over from London to see us. We met Noelia and Annelise in Iguazu Falls in Argentina and the four of us are travel/life-changing kindred spirits – we ‘get’ each other. 

Map of Jersey

With our host, Noelia, we toured the Channel Island of Jersey visiting such places as the beautiful Beauport Bay, the silky sandy beach of St. Brelade’s Bay, Gorey Bay, St. Juan’s Beach - a surfers’ paradise, and then having dinner watching the glorious sunset on the west side of Jersey. Small castles and fortifications from centuries of occupiers surround the Jersey island. The Jersey Island countryside is beautiful.

Map of Channel Islands

Some history… The islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the other Channel Islands represent the last remnants of the medieval Dukedom of Normandy once prominent in both France and England. The Channel Islands were the only British soil occupied by German troops in World War II. With slave labor they built massive defenses against possible invasion that never came.

 

 
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