We have arrived in St Malo (in France Brittany province) after a long trip of planes, trains and automobiles (well without the trains). We flew into Paris, collected our rental car, and then drove the long 4 1/2 hour drive to St Malo, with a stop over in La Roche-Goyon and Giverny (a one day stopover actually) to see Claude Monet's garden.
Our flight landed at about 8am local Paris time (after a 10 hour flight from Vancouver) and then it took over an hour to get through customs to collect our bags. CDG airport in Paris is one of those airports where the planes park miles and miles from the airport and then you have to wait for/take a bus to even get to the terminal. Customs was pretty busy but efficient, and we collected our bags without issue. We only took about 3 or 4 wrong turns on the first leg of our drive (to La Roche Guyon) which was about a 90 minute drive. We arrived in the cute small town (one of the approx 1700 "most beautiful town in all of France") and since we couldn't check into our hotel until 4pm we decided to have a coffee and then explore the local chateau (which means "castle" over here).
Here is a view of Chateau Roche Guyon from the gardens across the street (which we explored later on). The chateau consists of the large yellow building at the bottom of the hill and the fort at the top of the hill. You can see the entry to the tunnel that you climb (carved directly through the cliff) just above the chateau roof.
Here we are at the top of the fort.
And here is a view of the tunnel - about 300 steps total.
Afterwards we went for lunch - crepes with cider, which is a local specialty in this part of the world.
The next day we drove to Giverny to visit Claude Monet's house and garden. Here are some pretty flowers.
Here is the Japanese bridge (not the real Japanese bridge, just a tribute) over the water lily pond.
A selfie to prove we were here.
After the gardens we had some sandwiches in a local cafe, and then did the rest of the drive to St Malo. We met our French home exchange hosts and managed to communicate pretty well in French. That night we didn't have energy for much other than picking up a few groceries. We got some mystery meat from the butcher (pre-marinated curried meat - we thought it was chicken, the butcher called it "scallop" (or so we thought) but in the end we decided it was probably pork). We also picked up some bread and tarts at the local boulangerie, which we managed to sneak into just as they were trying to close.
In the morning we visited the local farmers market (this is Sonya about to buy some tomatoes).
Then we did the walk along the beach to the "old town" (about an hours walk). (We're not actually staying in St Malo, but in Le Petite Paramé, which is right next door. Kind of like Oak Bay vs Victoria.)
You can see that the tide is out. Low tide today was at 2:30pm (it's about 11:30am in the above photo) at 2.25m, and high tide is at about 8pm, at 11.59m, for a difference of over 9m, or 30 feet. In Victoria today the difference between low and high tide is abut 3 feet.
For lunch today we had crepes and cider again. (Hey that's what they do here, what can we do.) (Actually not crepes but "galettes", which are made with buckwheat flour instead of normal flour.)
After lunch we explored one of the small islands surrounding St Malo. There are wuite a few small islands in the bay, many of which contain forts or other structures, and many of which you can get to at low tide (but be careful or you could get stranded there at high tide!)
This is a view from the island back to "old town".
We wandered around town for awhile, and visited the local church (the tall steeple in the above photo). Of course everything was destroyed during WW2 and the rebuilding of the church wasn't completed until the 1970's.
Jacques Cartier is buried here. He's from St Malo and famously "discovered" Canada.
Tonight we're tired again (we spent the better part of the whole day today walking, and we're still getting over our jet lag) so we're going to dine in on some local mussels, fish ("rouget barbet") and cheese that we bought at the market tomorrow. Tomorrow if we have the energy we're going to go on a hike and then visit Cancale (the oyster capitol of France)!
