We booked our tickets for France for this upcoming September this very morning and I am so excited to FINALLY get our trip booked after thinking about it for a very long time!

I have a rough idea of our itinerary and I've been looking at the events that will be going on while we will be in France. I'm thinking we will be in the Normandy area the third weekend in September which means three major events are listed on the Normandy Tourism Calendar: Neufchâtel cheese festival in Seine-Maritime, Festival Cidre & Dragon in Merville-Franceville, and Heritage Days all over Normandy. I used the linked search page (http://www.journeesdupatrimoine.culture.fr/), and it just pulls up lots of interesting sites but I don't really see any particular information that is helpful for planning something around these "heritage activities". Can someone with experience of travel during this weekend please advise?

That is a great time to be in Normandy. There are openings and events all over on this weekend. The national Journees du Patrimoine website comes out with listings in mid-August, but it doesn't list everything, just the major openings. Closer to the time, check out the local tourist office in the area where you'll be staying for a complete list of what's available near you.

In the Orne we've visited manor houses, gardens, a horse farm, goat farm, museums, art exhibits, and of course a lot of churches.

That link you have gives information, I'm not sure what the questio is. It has a search function and you have to search for specific things, then it gives info. For example, you pick the Region (Basse-Normandie), then type of event (say "ouverture exceptionnelle" or whatever you want) then it gives you a list of venues with that feature. YOu can click on ones of interest and it gives details on times, etc. IN fact, it even has a map with all the hits marked on it.

I suppose it might be easier to have one list by date/time or something, but a small area, I agree that is best gotten from the TO. Even in Paris, the ones you can find in the metro with the full listings aren't online, pretty sure.

I guess that I was thinking there might be special "events" or "activities" with certain times. When I look at the website for the Normandy region and it seemed to me to give listings of a lot of sites and buildings, but I didn't see anything for special events/activities...

Perhaps mid-August they come out with more specific information, as Coquelicot suggests?

The only special 'event' anywhere is the exceptional opening of things that are not generally open to the public (private châteaux, factories, military installations, municipal buildings...) or else the fact that most of the places you normally have to pay to see are free on those days.

Thanks for the clarification, Kerouac. I'm sure we would find the chateaux interesting; we will look into those and other things. It would be nice to build some time into our itinerary to have free time to take suggestions from TIs and locals while there. We'd like to do the Route du Cidre while in Normandy, do you think doing it on the Heritage Days weekend would be a good or bad idea?

You can only figure that out when the heritage events are published.

There's enough going on that weekend for us to devote the whole two days to J du P openings.

Friday night I sit down with the local paper which lists everything going on, as well as any flyers we've managed to pick up from all the tourist offices. I map the locations and make note of each place's open hours (nearly everything closes at lunch) and days since some things are open only one day. I plan the weekend so we're sure to see our top choices and then whatever else we can fit in nearby. We've never been able to see everything that's on offer.

I'm talking about a specific part of Normandy, the Perche. It's a fairly small area, but there are a lot of openings in that area, so many that we've never been able to see them all. Could be that this part of Normandy is just more gung-ho about the weekend than elsewhere.