Day 104 Rennes to St Malo

In which Sid and Doris make for the seaside and stay in the walled town, again.
Is this your first visit to St Malo? No, we have sailed the mighty Eric through the huge lock into the Port de Plaisance. Sid and Doris have cycled away from here on the trip to Bilbao. We are old mingers at St Malo.

Leaving Rennes we have the satisfaction of riding past the public baths, looking just like they did in the drawings. [sorry we didn’t get a picture of it so thank you Mr Kyrie Hotel of Rennes for this one – D.]

When route planning it is hard to spot which local roads will be busy and which quiet. The planned route is a bit too busy to be fun. So we pull off to look at the paper map. Michelin mapping is just splendid. [I found in the end that it was easier to take a photo of the map (first pic) and then enlarge it on my phone.  Compare that mapping with the standard phone maps. This explains why so many of the photos of me have me staring crossly at the phone screen on my bike – D.][Please do give some real consideration to developing a decent map display app for the phone, you would be SOO popular and who knows maybe you would be rich too when Google etc buy your company in order to shut it down.]

 

We make a new plan that takes us towards the Canal d’Ille et Rance and later a Route Barree, which sign we routinely ignore. Scene here is Doris with chrysanthemums and lock keeper’s cottage.

Sid and Doris love this time of year. Summer is over. The roses are clinging on, memories of Hungary. Indian summers may come. The air is cool. We are wearing our light jackets. The temperature never gets over 25 degrees.

In Montreuil sur L’Ille (not Monet’s Montreuil) we admire the eccentric spire while watching the life of the village bar, lotto and betting shop (a conjunction specifically banned in the UK).

We rejoin our planned route at Combourg where we are surprised to find such a Loire-ish Chateau reflected in the artifice lake that once powered the lord’s mill. The town is having its market so we push the Neddies through the throng only to betray all the artisanal stalls by sneaking into the Carrefour.

Stomach time, which is not the same as watch time, decrees a stop in the shade by the church at Baguer Morvan mostly built in the 1860s, offering fine demonstrations of competitive censer swinging and how to do annuncing.

In the event that Doris needs another pen name we can suggest Roz Landrieux, the next small town we go through. As we saw in the Rennes museum what people look like changes according to when they are recorded. Here are what school children looked like when this sign was put up in the early 1960s. This was when more of life was in black and white.

The French car park has been as confined as ever. This may be a Chevrolet Suburban but all information gladly received. Conveyance of the day probably should go to the Etoile du Roy (smaller than Rochefort’s Hermione).

  Also in the frame: a bike in this evening’s cafe bar and this 2CV, which has a worse respray than we’ve seen for some time. Sid awards the prize to the ship. Maybe we should get sailing again.

We came into town after 85 kilometres along the beach road. We are doing about the same distance as when we started and do not feel much fitter. Here is Doris with the Channel, our next sea. [“50p to me! I can see the sea!!”  Oh, doesn’t everyone play that game? – D.]
Just in case the opportunity does not present itself again we eat ice cream by the seaside. And later Sid and Doris share an excellent steak and chips in the Petit Rotisseur (that is a recommendation). You can’t be too careful.

Doris does some final bits of French #virtualsouvenir shopping – an excellent kingfisher on a stick to remind Sid of the ones he’s spotted, and a framed photo of a seagull.

 

[The thing that appealed to me about this photo was the colour that you can see as the sun shines through the seagull’s foot webbing.  One of the ferries in Istanbul had a white canvas roof over the deck with seagulls standing on it.  From underneath you could see the grey shadows of the seagulls’ bodies and the yellow shapes of their feet.  Another missed photo opportunity, alas – D.]