Braving the breezes of Brittany

Hi everyone,

We fell out of contact for a while there, sorry, spending two weeks deep in the Brittany countryside without WiFi or internet cafes and paying far too much to sit and blog on in the tourist office in the nearby town of Dinan. For a while, in fact, we were worried that we had fallen out of France altogether with so many of the farm houses in the area (including our own) now owned by retired British couples. All of a sudden we found ourselves with only British TV channels (endless election coverage) and a kitchen stocked with tea and HP Sauce!

The weather changed too with a chilly wind blasting down from Scotland (their fault again). You know it’s cold when you find yourself going into cathedrals to get warm as we did one freezing day in St Malo, and many a planned picnic was abandoned for long lunches in cosy creperies.

Nevertheless, we had lovely times there, getting to know the local area quite well, having days where we simply wandered the fields and banks of the beautiful River Rance or went about our business in the fabulous mediaeval walled city of Dinan complete with ramparts, city gates and steep cobbled streets of wonky half-timbered houses. It’s quite strange to be doing mundane things like supermarket shopping and getting haircuts etc in a place like that.

Every other day we travelled further afield to explore Brittany – taking in the iconic Mont St Michel, the walled port of St Malo (the cold day), sections of the Rose Granite Coast with its extraordinary tide variations, the busy port city of Brest and the central forests, dolmens and fairytale castle town of Josselin.

Probably our favourite day was spent on the tiny Ile de Brehat off the northern coast, with a rich fishing history, Breton lighthouses, bicycle paths (no cars there), rugged pink granite coastline and fields of wildflowers. We got so carried away with exploring the place that we only just made the last ferry back to Paimpol.

We are now experiencing long twilights with the sun setting well after 10 o’clock at night. It’s beautiful but it keeps you up late and makes those French shops even harder to catch open in the mornings. We continue to struggle with the cat and mouse game of French business hours. If it’s not Sunday or Monday, then it’s a public holiday (we had two of those in just over a week in early May) or it’s lunch time or it’s nearly lunch time and they can’t fit you in, or they choose to shut on Wednesdays as well. It’s all very lifestyle friendly, but you do find yourself wondering how some of these businesses can survive in this day and age, or what would happen if France were to have a large south-east Asian immigration!

We saw the same economically irrational phenomenon when we went to the circus in a neighbouring town. It was a real old travelling family circus, very common in France, but we were one of only three families in the audience on the Saturday evening (there were almost more people in the circus). The ‘spectacle’ was stunningly amateur – a seriously depressed monkey in uniform that wouldn’t salute, a 4-year-old girl dropping her hoolah hoop constantly, a cat running through a pipe, turning around and running back through again – da daa! It all looked very shabby chic charming but was clearly struggling to survive this age of multimedia entertainment. The whole show was only held together by grandpa’s corny clown banter and the genuine talents of the very earnest 11-year-old boy. He really won our hearts. We all hoped that he would run away one day to join a different circus!

We spent two packed days in the Loire Valley on the way down south where we visited Chateau Villandry with its beautiful geometric gardens made almost entirely of vegetables, a large winery and the remains of an 19th century troglodyte village. The village where we stayed ourselves was absolutely riddled with underground passages and caves – very exciting for boys with torches.

We are now settling into our second longer stay house – this time in the Lot Valley (near the Dordogne). It’s a huge and beautiful farmhouse owned by a family friend from Lismore and we are sharing it with four other North Coast NSW people, including a couple who live on the farm across the valley from my Dad. The area has wonderful markets, food, fortified villages and prehistoric cave paintings but that, as they say, is another blog entry.

Love to you all and thanks for all the snippets of contact and news.

Alison, John, Lawrence and Francis