St Brieuc

Stand French bfast at 8:30, then headed out only to be greeted by a flat tire on my bike. It was in the exact same spot of my previous flat so we knew something was in there. We looked really carefully, couldn’t feel anything, but as we were flexing the tire a tiny piece of glass came out of the tire. We couldn’t feel it on the outside or the inside, and it had been there for a few days. But I pumped my tire up to 100 lbs pressure yesterday, and as April has been unloading stuff to me (shits weak), and perhaps I‘ve been gaining weight (!), it finally caused the leak again. So I used April’s spare tube, fixed it and away we went.

Had a great ride in the morning. Sun was finally out, puffy clouds, warm but not hot, we were high on a plateau and had great views all around, nice roads with no traffic. Perfect riding. We’re starting to like the roads just slightly inland as we avoid the up+down of the coast, and still have great views and no cars. And we can always see where we are by measuring ourselves against the freaking churches. They’re so tall and one in every village, we can almost track our route from church to church.

Had s slightly longer day today, 50+ miles, but we stayed on larger roads so it went pretty fast. On the larger roads we’re going 15+ mph. We hadn’t bought one of the detailed maps for today, our old one from yesterday covered about 1/3 of the route today and we thought we could manage. Well right after our good map ended we made a wrong turn and ended up on the wrong road. But it proved fortuitous as it gave us a shorter route towards our lunch town.

We passed thru the town of Paimpol, which is known to the rest of Brittany as the Village of the Icelanders. The fishing boats around here (the morutiers) used to leave for 6 months at a time and fish off Iceland and Newfoundland. The Paimpol region alone lost over 100 ships and 2000 men in just 80 years! The cod fishing declined in the 1930s, but a few ships still operate out of St Quay, which is the only deep water port between Brest and Cherbourg (in Normandy?).

Had a nice lunch in Plouha, pizza and omelette/frites, then made our way over to the coast. Had some killer hills that we actually rode up for a change. Getting stronger?

Then got lost again as we headed into St Brieuc the largest town we’re going to hit. We decided to stay here because we need to buy train tickets from St Malo back to paris and we needed to reserve spots on the TGV (train de grand vitesse, train of great speed).

Had a huge hill just filled with glass getting into St Brieuc. Had flakes all over our tired but no flats.

We had reserved in an Manor house in St Brieuc, and it was really old. April got scared just walking in. But the madame was great, very friendly, we had a ton of fun chatting with her. She let us use her computer since she didn’t know the wifi security key (her son had set it up). Her grandfather built the house after the French Revolution, late 1700s? She told us her husband’s family had come to Breton from Scotland in the year 1050! Old aristocrats.

Had a rare crappy dinner at a Best Western Brasserie (Madame had recommended it). Got back to the house, it was all dark and eerie. April thought we were in the Bates Motel (Hitchcock, psycho). But the night was uneventful and we had a great sleep. In the morning we also talked with Madam’s daughter and son-in-law, and they had their 4 kids in tow. The son-in-law was in the French Military, loved the States, had been in Leavenworth, Orlando, and Kentucky (all for military training stuff). He even admitted the house was strange. He said it was like the Adams Family. Ha-ha.

We thoroughly enjoyed our stay here because we spent so much time chatting with the family. We talked about our kids, where we lived, the geography of the States, Berkeley (where her daughter had been for 4 months), how the Greeks influenced everything (none of that new shit from the year 1050), etc, etc. A great stay. Madame was going to give us a ride to the bike store to get some more patches, but we made our way there the following morning. As always the friendliness of the owners had a great influence on how much we enjoy a place. You can tell which owner really like doing it, and which find it a headache.