Visit to the Côte de Granite Rose

We spent two nights in a small AirBnb in Perros-Guirec, on the Granite Coast (a small resort town about a 2 hour drive from St Malo).  We did a few days of hiking as well as a visit by boat to the lovely island of Île-de-Bréhat (purple circles on the below map) - also part of the famous GR 34.

Monday we arrived in Perros-Guirec, and since we couldn't check into our AirBnb until the afternoon (our host was very insistent and every message reinforced the checkin at 3pm and checkout by 11am NO EXCEPTIONS) so we did a hike around the coast.

Our walking route started in Perros-Guirec and very quickly we came upon the famous beautiful granite formations.

We admired these for awhile and looked to see how many faces we could find.

Just to prove we were here ... :-P

Does this look like the Lion King or Homer Simpson?

A beautiful vista!

Some of the rocks, smoothed by weather, look like fabric!

Another face hiding in the granite.

Another beautiful vista!

Heading down the trail ...

Another fancy French lighthouse.

Vista with the fancy lighthouse and some of the neighbours.  Amazing to think people live along this coast!

Tuesday on advice from our home exchange host we did a boat trip to Île-de-Bréhat.  Here is Sonya waiting by the pier.  At this point it's close to low tide, so we had to walk out fairly far along the pier to a point that the boat could dock.

Our ferry!

Another fancy French lighthouse, at the northern end of the island.  (There are actually two island, connected by a little bridge.  You have to be knowledgeable of the tides in this part of the world or you could get stranded on the north island!)

Closer to the fancy lighthouse.

Some more studding granite rock formations.

A view looking south from the lighthouse, still low-ish tide.

The rocks along the shore ...

... and built into the wall surrounding the lighthouse.

There is a small town on the south island.  The population of the island (technically "islands" I guess) is about 300, most of whom live in town.

We found an old boat wrecked along the beach.  (Well ...  "we found" ... actually it was listed on google maps :-P)

Close up inspection of the boat in case my friend Chris wants to buy it.  A handyman's delight!

My footprints in the mud walking up to the boat.

Wednesday we checked out of our AirBnb (before 11am!!!) and on the way home visited a couple of Menhirs and did another hike (aborted by a torrential downpour!!!)  (We planned an 8km hike around Grande Ile.  In our route below you can see where we abandoned the coast and made a bee line back to our car.)

The first menhir we visited - about 5000 years old, but desecrated in about 1700 by some Christians.

The second menhir, also about 5000 years old.

(Actually to be pedantic a "dolmen", which means "table rock", as opposed to "menhir", which means "upright rock", and which Asterix fans will be familiar with.  I'm reading the Inspector Dupin series of books by Jean-Luc Bannal'ec, which all take place in Brittany ("Death in Brittany" etc) and provide a lot of good Brittany lore!!!  Including some information about menhirs and dolmens and one other kind of big ancient stone which I forget.)

(There's also an "Inspector Dupin" TV series, which we are also watching, which for some reason is in German.  It's bizarre watching a TV show taking place in Brittany where everyone is speaking German, almost as if they'd won the last war.  (Except they all still say "bonjour".)  There was a German family on the Île-de-Bréhat and I wanted to ask them if they'd come to Brittany because of the Inspector Dupin TV show?)

Is this a menhir?  No just a big rock.  Note the lines along the end where it was cut.

Is this a menhir?  No just a marker for our island trail.  (It's started drizzling but not yet pouring.)

There's some sunlight somewhere!

More clouds rolling in!!!  It hasn't started pouring yet so we're soldiering on with our walk!

  

There is an old Brittany saying - "It only rains on idiots" (I also got this from Inspector Dupin).  Anyways it started pouring on us, so we abandoned our walk, changed in the car (at least we had the foresight to bring a change of cloths) and headed home.  Along the way we stopped for lunch at a local creperie, and then back for our last couple of days in St Malo!

Visit to Rennes

We did an overnight trip to Rennes, the capitol of Brittany Province, staying at a lovely AirBnb studio apartment.

We started our walking tour in the central plaza, here is a vertical panorama of city hall and the opera house, which are at opposite ends of the square.

And an obligatory church shot.

We visited the Parc du Thabor, but I'll have to let Sonya do a guest blog about that.  Here are a couple of pics.

(A local photography club was having an exposition in the park, so we browsed their photos and voted on our favourites.)

One of the main reasons for the trip - a visit to the weekly Rennes market, the second largest in all of France!  (The largest is in Paris, and is a wholesale-only market - I don't think the public is allowed - so strictly speaking this is the LARGEST market (that we can actually visit)).  We bought a bunch of fruit and vegetables for our Thanksgiving dinner (our visit was on the Fri/Sat of the Thanksgiving weekend) as well as 4 (!!!) deserts.  There were a lot of really good looking meat and seafood vendors there - with really really long lineups - but we couldn't buy anything that we couldn't leave in the car all day.

We some more walking around the city.  Here are some spectacular half-timber homes dating back to the "great fire of the 17th century".  (All these old cities seem to have some event like this that defines their history.)

It was raining so we ducked in the Rennes Art Museum.  The lineup at the Mona Lisa was slightly less than we encountered at the Louvre last year.

Another view of the half-timber homes.  Rennes is really a very beautiful city!!!

One of my "famous" (famous in my own mind anyways) vertical panoramas, of the cathedral in Rennes.

Thanksgiving Sunday was a relaxing day in St Malo (relaxing meaning we did a less than 10km walk during the day).  For dinner we roasted the veggies from the Rennes market, made a nice salad from the veggies from the Rennes market, and cooked up a "Milles Feuilles Boeuf" that we picked up at our local Farmers store on the way home from Rennes.

Oh we also had some oysters for an appie, that we picked up from a vendor selling them out of the back of their van on Sunday morning.  Only in France!!!

Erquy, and some GR34 mini-hikes

Today (Thursday) we did a day trip to Erquy (the scallop capitol of France, and also the inspiration for the village of Asterix the Gaul).  It was a lovely little town, and like a lot of places that we've found in France in the middle of October, very quiet!  Today there were 2 tourists in all of Erquy.

This is the view from the beach (all the restaurants and - we think - all the fish/seafood arrive on the right of the picture.

We had a lovely lunch - Sonya had the scallops (of course) and I had the set menu - three course with fish soup, fish of the day and "Far Breton" for desert.  I wanted to compare the soupe au poisson vs the one we had the previous day in Dinard, and the "Far Breton" with the one we had in Mont St Michel.

We did a couple of very short GR 34 hikes - the points of Erquy and Frehel (the two yellow circles on the map below.  Cape Frehel was the most spectacular that we've seen on our trip so far!

Cape Erquy.

Just outside of Erquy, we drove to the parking and walked around the point.  The rocks (like a lot of the houses in Erquy) had a pinkish tinge.  (Next week we're travelling to the Cote de Granite Rose so we think this is a preliminary taste.)

Cape Erquy.

Cape Frehel off in the distance.

You can count the layers of sediment, like counting rings in a tree.

Mostly barren, but beautiful little yellow and purple flowers are poking up everywhere.

Can you see the pinkish tinge?

Cap Frehel.

Walking towards the fancy French lighthouse.

A pink wall around the lighthouse grounds.

Cape Frehel, with Cape Erquy off in the distance.

Another windy and rainy day.

Out towards the point.

More plants fighting for space.

The rock formations here are spectacular.

You can see some people walking along the cliff in the distance, which should give you a sense of scale.

Another view of the fancy lighthouse, across the field of brush.