Thursday 17 October 2024
Visit to the Côte de Granite Rose
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.
(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.
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!!!
Thursday 10 October 2024
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 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.