Our first week was pure holiday. Riding, reading, pool time, and food — shopping for it, cooking it, eating it. And drinking wine, of course.
We stayed at a caravan site near Carnac in Brittany, with a large outdoor pool complex, as well as both covered and indoor pools, a zipline course, crazy golf, tennis courts and nightly entertainment, all onsite. There was even a circus the first couple of nights, and although we didn’t go to the show, Tim and Nate did take part in a circus skills workshop in the Big Top. Our caravan was quite new and very clean, with 3 bedrooms, a great covered deck and enough parking for the trailer and the car. We were close to the centre but set back off the road, and fairly private.
The pool was a few minutes’ walk away, so several times most days, the kids played in the water and Eric and/or I lay on a lounger in the sun reading. We did both get in a few times to cool off.
We ate bread and cheese, olives and tomatoes, ham and salami for lunch. We cooked meat on the BBQ for dinner, with lots of fresh veggies and salads, and then wandered down to the entertainment show as it was getting dark around 9:15. The kids were surprisingly interested in the shows, despite them being in French. I guess juggling, magic tricks, song and dance don’t need language. There was more interpretive dance than we’ve ever seen before!
We went for a family bike ride on Tuesday, with Nate on his own bike instead of the tandem (we weren’t going to go too far). We found bike paths, meandered into Carnac and along the coast a bit, made our way into Plouharnel to look for lunch, heading towards a pizza shop but were disappointed to find it was closed. However, around the corner we discovered a pizza vending machine(!) which actually looked pretty good. We were very brave and decided to try it. Our first order was goat cheese and honey, cooked in 3 minutes and served in a pizza box with a little wooden knife to cut it. It was really excellent, so we got a second one. Once fed, we kept riding, heading for the Quiberon peninsula. It was getting warmer but the road was flat and there were cycle paths or lanes. We made it more than halfway down the peninsula before we stopped again for ice cream in Saint-Pierre-Quiberon. By the time we turned around and rode back, we’d covered just about 50km!! Nate struggled at times, but for a 10 year old whose longest prior bike ride was 15 or 20km, he did amazingly well! It may have taken us 6 hours overall, and there *may* have been some whining and complaining, fighting and stressing along the way, but I think we were all pleased with ourselves afterwards.
I wanted to get out to visit some picturesque Brittany towns and I had read something about Pont-Aven, so without much further research (crappy internet), we headed there. It was an hour of driving for a town of art galleries and high-end tourist shops which is not really our thing, so that was a bit disappointing. And we couldn’t even find coffee!
However, Eric wanted to get out for a longer ride, so the next morning he headed out northwards on his bike. After a couple of hours, the kids and I drove up to Pontivy to meet him. He had a scenic and hilly 3+ hour ride and we had a lovely drive, and Pontivy was a much prettier medieval town than Pont-Aven.
The caravan site was opposite a field of ancient standing stones, the Alignements de Carnac. There are more than 3,000 of these megalithic stones in the area, standing in lines, erected more than 4,500 years ago. There are theories about why they’re there, but no absolutely certain explanations. It took us until Friday to decide to go on a tour and learn more about them, and after walking/cycling/driving past them several times over the week, it was interesting to walk around and in between them in the field. There are also dolmens and passage tombs in the area which have similar art and style to what we’ve seen in Newgrange and Knowth, and other megalithic sites near where we live in Ireland. Clearly the populations were related.
Another interesting connection to home was the Breton language on all the road signs (along with French, of course). It’s clearly in the same linguistic family as Irish Gaelic, although more closely related to Cornish and Welsh.
This was a week of relaxing and recovering from all the work of getting ready, and a great way to kick off our travels.