It’s been grey, cool and wet since we’ve arrived in Brittany, which was sort of unexpected after being subjected to all the news stories about Europe being in a historic heat wave! We’ve been staying in hotels and AirBnb’s for most of our days in Brittany, avoiding camping in the rain.
Yesterday, we left Pont L’ABBÉ under threatening skies, which made good on their threats within an hour or two. The forecast was for wind, and we got that, but we also got rain as a bonus with the wind until about 1PM, when the predicted rain arrived in spades. While the landscape was nice, it’s less easy to ohh and ahh when the rain is pounding on your helmet!
We were heading for Concarneau, a touristic town with a picturesque walled town started in the 14th century. We got there, got checked in to our hotel, showered and found a lovely local restaurant literally just around the corner. That was lucky since it was still pissing down rain and Chris was halfway ready to just stay in her pajamas in our room for the night.
The dinner was worth getting dressed for! We had a local variety of moule and also steak frites, washed down by a lovely bottle of Samur red, interspersed with a bottle of bubbly water to keep us hydrated.
The next day we decided to ride to Lorient about 55 miles distant, to catch a train to Nantes the following day, avoiding the forecasted high winds and heavy rains in the next couple days. I think we’ve both had enough of the rainy weather for now. When it’s broiling hot in Spain, we might wonder what the problem was with 68 degrees and cloudy.
Taking the train to Nantes also will allow us to not retrace our ride from Vannes to Nantes that we did last year. And give us a few more days wiggle room getting to Madrid, allowing us potentially more days to visit places along the way that interest us.
We went though the 14th century walled town of Concarneau as we left in the morning. The route we are following passes right through the walls of the old city, which is situated on an island connected on only one side to the mainland by a stone bridge and accessible on the other by ferry.
The days ride from Concarneau was really nice. Yes, we got some rain, but not a lot. And yes, it was overcast most of the day, and we were certainly not in need of sunscreen. But we had a nice tail wind most of day. 🙂
We are following the route Littoral, which means the route by the coast. Littoral means the same thing in English but neither Chris nor I was aware of that word before. In any case, we followed the coast for a good deal of the day, sometimes on ancient Roman roads that made us glad for wide tires. It was a really lovely day.
We arrived in Lorient, and settled in after getting some food from the market. We’ll take the 12:40PM train tomorrow to Nantes, so we’ll get to sleep in a bit tomorrow.
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