Welcome to blog 2 - Concarneau to ......

Hurrah - we survived the storm on Tuesday & Wednesday although one of our ropes didn’t make it 😱. Andrew has done a great job of fixing it, so we can still use the rope but it is a little bit shorter. We are now waiting for a good weather window to move south & hopefully towards some warmer & dryer weather. Sunday is hopefully the day.

We did a bus trip yesterday to Pont-Aven (where Gauguin painted some of his most famous pictures) - a delightfully pretty little Bretagne town on the estuary just down the coast from here. Buses here in France are really cheap - it only cost us 1 Euro each, each way - who would have thought we would take to buses!!

We spent a lovely few hours walking around the towns shops and along the river. It was mostly sunny & dry yesterday but today is grey & raining again & like the UK it isn’t very warm & summery yet. As you may have noticed from the photos we didn’t pack much for cold & wet weather so are having to recycle the few warm bits we have a lot. All our shorts and t-shirts etc are so far redundant & as for my host of swimming costumes 😂😂 I think it may be a while!! Despite the weather though we are loving the Bretagne food & markets & seeing all the gorgeous towns along this coast so it is worth it.

Andrew is doing a long board meeting by Skype today and I am on ironing & sorting out duty. Tomorrow we plan to get the bikes out and do a coastal ride, the beaches here are stunning but we are unlikely to be sunbathing quite yet.

Finally a beautifully sunny day with calm seas and slight breeze 😎perfect conditions for our 5 hour trip here. We are now on the edge of the hopefully stunning gulf of Morbihan. We will let you know if it is stunning or not after we have been round it but the travel books all rave about it so fingers crossed. The best thing though is the sunshine & warmth. More soon......

Hello sunshine ☀️ long may it last. We are enjoying being outside, lots of walking and cycling now that the weather is getting better.

We are also loving the French markets which are just brimming with amazing fresh food and yummy things. We seem to find a new market in every location. We are trying lots of new things in each place & have found that strawberries from Plougastel are the worlds best, Brittany butter is devine \240and cheese in general from anywhere is delicious.

Today we did a boat tour of the Golfe of Morbihan. Not on Verano Azul but Angelus 4 - a tour boat for the Golfe. We read that the currents & tide in the Golfe are pretty treacherous so let another skipper do the hard work today. Morbihan is a beautiful almost inland sea with 42 islands and a very small entrance into the Atlantic. See the photo of the map below.

We ate delicious fresh oysters, \240followed by \240lobster with saffron sauce & chips, followed by strawberries & cream lunch with a nice bottle of Vouvray to wash it down (yummy) followed by a pretty walk on the largest island, \240Isle aux Moines (Monks Island). This whole area is full of dolmans & cairns as well as being stunningly beautiful. It’s unlikely we would ever have come here if we hadn’t been passing and we can highly recommend it.

Tomorrow we move on South again to the edge of Brittany.

It’s hard to believe that we have only been away from the UK for just over 3 weeks. It feels so much longer & we have already done & seen so much. So far so good - it’s been a huge learning experience in every way. We have another 3 weeks before we head back to the UK to see our boys, family & friends \240& Elton John so need to get down to close to Bordeaux by then to get our flights.

Now we are here. Port du Crouesty was fab but it was time to continue our journey southwards. Pornic is just south of the Loire river and therefore the start of the south of France - yippee 😀 we are making progress. The architecture is certainly different here and it feels different from Brittany already. More about Pornic when we have properly explored but so far it looks lovely & the sun is still shining and it’s still nice and warm. What more could we want.

Our trip here today was a little bit frisky (word stolen from a yachty but apt) \240although not too uncomfortable. Our boat was covered in salt from top to toe so usual cleaning jobs on arrival and now we can relax here for a couple of days.

We have been on a little jaunt out of Pornic by train today inland a little to Nantes. The fourth largest city in France and the capital of Brittany & only 1 hour by train. It was another lovely day of sightseeing and lots of walking. We visited the market of course. Wow and what a fabulous market full of delicious looking food although we resisted buying anything. .

We also went to an old shopping arcade, the chateau & to the cathedral (see photos below). Some of Nantes is lovely, other bits are a reminder that it too was bombed heavily in WW2 and also the French do the weirdest things to 800 year old buildings - see the slide running down from the ramparts of the castle to the moat - what a shocker 😵!!

We had a lovely lunch in a small fish restaurant recommended on trip advisor - very delicious and had the most novel amuse Bouche we have seen so far - instead of olives we were given bigourneau ((winkles) yummy.

The French trains we have been on so far are good, clean, run on time but not that cheap (compared to the buses). We have now been car free for a month and it is doing wonders for our daily step count & fitness.

Just arrived here after lovely gentle sunny trip down. Les Sables de L’Olonne is the base of the Vendée Round the World yatching race challenge which happens every 4 years and is due next year. As such it is a huge and well functioning marina although the town is not the prettiest we have visited so far. Yesterday they had some sort of boating event on here with this huge trimaran on show (enough to make anyone feel small😌. There was also this crazy man demonstrating a jet pack over the marina, see the not very good video below, it does however give you an idea of how noisy it was and quite mad!!

For once we do have good WiFi again so we treated ourselves to a bit of Our Planet & Ozark last night after a lovely supper of crevettes, bulot’s & a delicious entrecôte steak with my new favourite veg, \240Asperges Sauvage (wild asparagus) I will try to remember to photograph it next time before we eat it all. I had never seen it before Pornic but we tried it there & it is really tasty.

Having now explored the town we can honestly say it’s not worth visiting. Yes it’s Monday so nothing is open (this is France) but it really doesn’t have a lot going for it except this huge golden beach. \240Similar to Western-Super-Mare really. \240It is this beach I remember from a holiday here when I was 11 or 12 & we camped with The Thomases with Canvas Holudays. I just remember golden beaches & forest.

So we are not particularly anamoured with Sables d’Olonne but this is the first place we have visited so far that hasn’t excited us so in the scale of things not a disaster. Tomorrow we will try a cycle ride into the forest to the north & hopefully be a bit more inspired and we depart for La Rochelle & the ile de re on Weds so at least we know our next destination should be lovely.

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