Transit to Nantes

The main job today was to transit to our next and final base, Nantes. Shove everything in the two rolly bags—some of us are getting pretty casual about how we pack—roll down to the desk and pay the bill; roll to the car in the car park and load it; program the Garmin and head out.

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Heading out today was a bit more complicated because we hadn't had breakfast. Didn't want to make the 6- or 8-block walk into central Quimper to look for an open café, because Mondays are almost as frustrating as Sundays for that. So we decided to get a few klicks down the road and find something in some smaller town. We selected Quimperlé and at first regretted it, but after tooling around its centre ville a bit we spotted what turned out to be quite a nice café. Petit dejeuner consisting of coffee, hunk of baguette, very good croissant, glass of OJ, and prewrapped dabs of butter and jam: €7 for each of us. The bar was like an old guys' club: one gray-haired local dude after another would come in, greet the owner, got his coffee, read the paper, and toddle out.

OK, on to the one planned "thing," the Château de Kerguéhennec, where a large garden and outdoor sculpture park is open to the public. This turned out to be a pleasant 2-km ramble through a wooded parkland with a great variety of humongous trees, all labelled.

Purple rhododendrons grow like weeds in this part of France. And yes, Californians, that is a Coast Redwood left center.

Liquidambar, a modest street tree in Palo Alto (find Marian)

There were some pretty blossoms.

Portugal Laurel (Prunus lusitanica) – a 20-foot-high "bush" ...

... covered in extremely fragrant blossoms.

Mountain Laurel

There were a dozen or so objects of art nestled among the trees. Most of them looked pretty silly to our eyes.

Large heap of rocks.

Clearly inspired by farm machinery but titled "Phoenix" (the bird, not the place).

One we actually liked is Au Bout by Rainer Gross.

Marian for scale.

So onward another 100km down a motorway to Nantes. Which turns out to be a large and busy city, but the first strong impression it makes is of being the home of some really obsessive pruners.

There are kilometers of streets like this. Here's another.

Spent the afternoon settling in and planning the next few days.

Miscellaneous Day around Quimper

The first thing to accomplish in Quimper was to find breakfast. The hotel serves one, but it's not very good. (How do they manage to find soft, spongy baguettes and tiny, non-flaky croissants—in a French city? It takes real shopping skill...) So we set out on foot to find an open café. Well, sorry to report, you cannot get petit dejeuner in central Quimper on a Sunday morning. Certainly not at 8am when we started looking, and not at 9am either, although the café with a sign about petit dejeuner a 9hrs at least had somebody on the premises to tell us that no, they don't serve until dix heures. Next door, though, the man said he had pas de croissants but if we had our own, he'd make us coffee to go with them. So we went into the market hall and found a live boulanger, got some croissants, traipsed back to the central square, and had our breakfast. Have not had this problem so seriously anywhere else.

Through all this walking about, clouds were rolling in and out with occasional spits of rain. But now there were fairly large blue patches racing by, alternating with dark clouds. So we decided to climb Mount Frugy. This is a hill just across the river from old Quimper from which the tourist office would like you to think you'll see great views. It's a moderately steep climb up sloping, paved paths through trees.

There were hardly any views going up, and the top was completely full of houses and trees. So we started down feeling a bit miffed at the guidebooks, but we took a slightly different route, and about halfway down found a view of the cathedral. This was what we'd been looking for the whole walk: a view over the cathedral with bright sun and dark clouds behind. Marian framed up the perfect composition...

...and here it is.

That's it, the perfect pic of Quimper cathedral.

Just can't stop with one pic even when it's the perfect one.

This view has the full length with the buttresses.

And a wee study of the lacy stonework of the galleries.

Down the hill and back to the hotel and assemble our laundry and go out and do the wash for the last time in France. We've been toting a big box of laundry soap tablets in the back of the car, using up two a week. Now Marian took the whole box into the laundromat and gave it to a nice gent who was there doing laundry with his two small kids.

By the time we'd put the clean laundry away, it was well past lunchtime. We walked back up to the Place au Buerre and had another crêpe for lunch. Only one of the five crêperies on that street was open this Sunday afternoon, but they were doing a great business.

So, what to do with the rest of the day? Marian pointed out that we had skipped one item from yesterday's plan, a nature walk on a freshwater marsh near Mousterlin. So we went off to do that.

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The sea-front promenade here was full of French families out for a Sunday stroll. People with dogs, people with prams, people with elderly parents, all chatting and walking.

A little way back from the sea-wall was the fresh-water estuary lake of a small river, and here we found more water birds than anywhere else in Brittany.

Several cormorants in the tree top. Below, egrets, a great blue heron and a night heron.

We walked another 2km here, bringing our total for the day to something like 6 (about 3.5 miles). After a soothing drink at a nearby café (there is always a nearby café), we decided to continue exploring the sea coast and drove to the end of a tiny peninsula, Île-Tudy. For a day forecast as "mostly cloudy, showers" the weather had turned out quite nice as we surveyed the harbor mouth.

Click for very large panorama of sea and sky.

Some very nice classic sailboats were passing.

Any Arthur Ransome fans around? This boat is about the size of the Swallow, and has the same standing-lug rigging.

For supper we couldn't stand the thought of yet another trek into central Quimper, looking (probably in vain) for an open restaurant, but the only places open close-by were fast-food ones. Passed on the Indian, passed on the Asian, and for supper had: Subway sandwiches. We blush.

We've now closed out the Quimper gallery at smugmug. It has quite a few pics not shown in the blog.

Concarneau, Trévarez, Pleyben

We did 3.5 things today: one old town (with museum), one château, and one more parish enclosure. (And Marian says there is one more yet to see.)

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Concarneau is a seaport and fishing port that has one asset precious in the modern world: an unspoiled, medieval walled island. Here's the general layout, as seen in a beautifully detailed model of the city as it was in 1967.

The walled, fortified old town looks like this from the shore.

Click to open 6-megapixel panorama.

Inside it is pretty much all given over to tourist commerce: food, gifts, souvenirs. We decided it was as if you'd squashed Mont St.-Michel down flat to eliminate those annoying stairs.

Looks like Bill Pawek there on the left.

There is also a cute little ferry boat that runs "the world's shortest sea voyage," a two-minute ride to the opposite shore.

The old town is also home to the Musée de la Pêche telling all you want to know about fishing across history and around the world. Like almost every French museum we've been in, it is well-organized and well-displayed. The greatest asset of this one is the many exquisitely detailed models it uses to explain things without words. (The model of the old town above is one of them.)

Finely-detailed model of early herring fishery.

It has other artifacts as well.

One serious sewing machine (for making sails).

And it had a former herring boat one could go aboard.

Hemerica, built in the 1950s.

We boarded it, to convince ourselves yet again that the life of a commercial fisherman sucks. (And we don't even watch "Deadliest Catch".)

David inspects the engine room.

Next stop, Château de Trévarez. Here's the Château itself. It's imposing, but ugly.

It's Victorian. The Victorians did ugly better than anybody.

That said, nobody goes for the building. They go to walk in its huge old gardens full of rhododendrons (just past their peak), azaleas, hydrangeas etc. We walked the 2km recommended circuit, pausing often.

Marian wore a color-matching sweater today

David surveys the forest of purple rhodies, some a century old.

OK, up next, the town of Pleyben and its parish enclosure St.-Germain. It has two spires, a huge (and, one would think, quite sufficiently impressive) Romanesque one and then, because you were nothing in the 16C if you didn't have a Gothic spire, it has a Gothic one too. And a small ossuary and a huge calvary.

Inside it had some impressive 16C stained glass,

And a barrel-vaulted ceiling painted blue with a complex intersection,

click through and look in the exact center

But the oddest thing about this place, and not mentioned in any guidebook, is the hundreds of small painted wooden figures that are all across the ceiling and along the edges of the ceiling. They are quite bizarre. Here is the one from the very center of the crossway, it's four angels(?) blowing trumpets.

Click through on this one: wait, is that blood trickling down, or a restoration error? And what's the nine-lobed thing they're standing on?

That's one of the more rational ones. Here's the center of a cross-beam.

The longer you try to figure it out, the odder it gets

Once we noticed those we started looking and the whole place has these, all unique. Here are three chosen more or less at random.

The girl with the lute? Ok! But what's the guy in green doing, and where are his legs?

It would be a fascinating project to properly photograph and index this place. But alas, or maybe not alas, we got to keep moving. A week from now we'll have turned in the car and be packing to depart!

Day of Pleasures

Yesterday's disappointments went away with the overcast. Today's scenery was almost as good as advertised and looked better under a clear sky. Plus, we made some serendipitous discoveries. Let us start with a map of the complicated route.

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First stop was a hill, Ménez-Hom, a high point with views. We were preceded by a walking tour group whose leader was pointing out the sights.

From this hill we made discovery number two, a beautiful bridge that we hadn't known about.

From the map we figured it must be Pont du Térénez, and made a note to visit it later. We could also see Douarnenez (do are neh nay), which we visited only yesterday for the Museum of Boats. Also from the hill we looked down on discovery number one: as we had driven to the hill we came through the village of Plomodiern, and noted another parish enclosure. This is how Sainte-Marie du Ménez Hom looks from Ménez Hom.

As we started down we noted the walking tour heading off to wherever they were going.

With our newly-trained eyes we had immediately spotted St.-Marie du Ménez Hom as a parish enclosure when we entered the village. It had all the pieces: an arch, a calvary, a weird spire with a rooster.

Inside, it had two barrel-vaulted ceilings that intersected.

Just one carved beam but with some very lively figures (click through to see)

and an extremely ornate altar-piece or altar-pieces filling a whole wall.

 

One detail among a plethora

Then we went on to a ruined abbey. What, another one? Well, the Abbey of Landévennec is very old and was rebuilt multiple times, and then extremely ruined, and now is being excavated by archaelogists who have a lot of fun working out which pieces are from the 8th, the 9th, the 10th, etc. century.

Overview of ruin

Excavation exposing overlapping walls of several different centuries.

Here there is a very nice museum with exhibits about the various periods of the abbey, and of things found in it. All of the info was in French but we managed to read quite a bit of it. One thing we learned: in the 800s, it was not uncommon for the Apostles to be represented symbolically as animals. Here is a reproduction of an illuminated page, made at Landévennec in the 800s, showing St. John as some kind of bird.

What was almost spooky was that they showed a similar drawing side by side with a carved image from a chapel in Ethiopia and they were almost the same. One uniquely Breton thing was that the Landévennec monks sometimes showed St. Mark symbolically as a horse, when the lion was the usual shorthand. Why? Because the word Mark in Breton means "horse."

Now we went off sightseeing along the Crozon Peninsula, which like yesterday's Cotentin Peninsula, sticks out into the Atlantic (see map above). First was a run up a north-pointing point, Pointe de Espagnols (from a Spanish invasion of the 1500s). Going up the east side of it we were looking across not much water to the metropolis of Brest.

Coming down the other side we are looking west at the pretty resort of Camaret-sur-Mer.

Click this, or better, control-click it, for a huge panorama.

In Camaret we stopped for gas, or rather diesel. But it was 2:45 and the gas station at the supermarket was closed for lunch until 3pm. Sometimes this really seems like a foreign country. But OK, it's an excuse for a break. We went down to the port and had ice creams and cold drinks. Then back to the station for fuel and on out another peninsula, Pointe du Pen-Hir (point H in the map above). The cliffs and sea views were getting good.

And lo, another huge panorama opens up.

Out at the end of this point there are sea-stacks where many sea birds are supposed to hang out.

No birds. Well, seagulls. And not a lot of those.

From here we went out yet another peninsula, Cap de la Chévre (Goat Cape; point I in the map above) from which we could look back and see those same sea stacks in the distance.

By now it was getting pretty late but we took in one more view.

And another multi-megapixel view of oceanic goodness.

From there we went on a cross-country run back to the vicinity of the beautiful bridge. (Remember the bridge we saw from the top of the hill about 6-7 hours ago? Point K on the map.) It turned out to be a winner: an asymmetrical cable-stayed bridge with a curved roadway. It just opened last year.

How it looks approaching it by car.

Half-way across

South pylon from the pedestrian walkway

Needlessly dramatic but fun view of the south pylon.

Then we continued to the nearest large town to find an early supper. At 6:30? Forget it! The restaurants aren't open yet, the brasseries are open but serving only drinks, the creperies have closed. We ended up with a not-too-bad pizza purchased from a truck beside the river.

Zip back to Quimper down the freeway, do blog, and crash. Nice day.