Our trip along the northern coast of Brittany took us back past Paimpol, but this time to the epic Abbaye de Beauport, as well as the windy Cap Fréhel before we reached our weekend destination of Saint-Malo.

    

During the rainy morning we said goodbye to Giselle and the lovely farm accommodation in Langoat and hit the road for the coast.

  

Paimpol‘s gorgeous Abbaye de Beauport was wonderful, we spent a few hours there but could easily have stayed all day exploring the grounds.

  

    

    

 

  

  

  

  

  

Outside among the many apple trees were some interesting historical installations, featuring old clocks and medieval music.

It was very windy at Cap Fréhel and the general feeling of the place was not dissimilar to Cape Point. I was surprised to see a very large group of people staring at and photographing a large rock next to a viewpoint – it looked pretty unexciting to me but maybe they saw something I didn’t? We did a quick circuit around the lighthouse before returning to the car.

  

  

  

  

  

Arriving in Saint-Malo was traumatic. The traffic had been increasing as we approached the town and by the time our GPS yelled to turn left we’d encountered our first robot in ages and I was in completely the wrong lane…after a lot of hooting and aggression from the locals we made it to our Airbnb.

It was a bit of a strange one, as the owners were away but we were told their son would be around (he worked till late at night and my mom saw him twice, I didn’t meet him) and that the key was ‘under the lavender’…the lavender was long dead but the key was indeed under its desiccated remains. Bizarrely the European locking system got the better of us and we had to ask two passing ladies to help us lock up when we later went out.

I’d chosen the accommodation because it was very close to the free shuttles into the walled city, which we joined in the evening.

  

  

  

  

    

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

I admit, I did not like Saint-Malo. The warmth and quaintness of pretty much every other town we’d been in just wasn’t there. It’s a very big place, both the old town and the new areas (which we didn’t see much of apart from through the windows of the shuttle and while walking through our suburb).

The walls are huge, truly impressive but also totally oppressive. As fortifications they’re about effectiveness not aesthetics but their sheer size demands that the buildings within them all be tall and narrow too, making the place feel quite ominous and unwelcoming. At least, that was my overall feeling. But we’d been to so many lovely small towns that being in somewhere so big and surrounded by so many people was also a real shock.

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BZH 2017: Intro  |  Pt 1  |  Pt 2  |  Pt 3  |  Pt 4  |  Paimpol 2017 – Festival du Chant de Marin 
Pt 5  |  Pt 6  |  Pt 7  |  Pt 8  |  Pt 9 |  Pt 10  | Pt 11  |  Pt 12  |  Saint-Malo: La Route du Rock Festival
Pt 13  |  Pt 14  |  Pt 15  |  pt 16  |  Pt 17  |  Pt 18

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