June 19, 2019
Quimper to Moëlan-sur-Mer
I had a hard time getting up this morning. Perhaps I'm done with travelling, but I still have a week before I get to Paris. Or maybe it's the gray weather again.
I did get up, though, and packed up my not-too-damp tent and left the campground at 0845. I know this because breakfast is available from 0900 and I didn't want to wait. I also noted the distance from my site (not the furthest) to the restaurant, which is near the office, and it was over 600 m.
This time I had no trouble riding the path to the centre of the old city. It was the way I'd been meant to go yesterday, but the server's description wasn't very good. She forgot (or I didn't hear) the part about turning 180° after leaving the gate!
In any case, I found a boulangerie and a café and after breakfast I went to the Musée Départemental Breton. I'd got there yesterday just as they were closing and today arrived just after opening. I spent an hour there, looking at the Bronze Age, Roman, and Mediæval displays and then moved on to the Breton costumes. I find it hard to believe that people dressed like that for daily life (and then I remember women doing everything in saris in India) but apparently the really extreme headdresses are from the early 20th century. You know, those towering lace things. Before the 1920s, they were actually quite small.
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The top floor contains furniture and architectural decoration. This museum was actually started more than a hundred years ago to preserve this type of thing, as old buildings were being demolished all across the region.
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It's a good thing the "Last Impressionists" temporary exhibit doesn't open until next week because I would have passed another hour looking at that. The Musée d'Orsay awaits!
It was a pleasant enough ride to Concarneau, which has an active fishing port, the usual port-side bars and restaurants, and a "ville clos" or walled city. It also has quite a few tourists, especially in the walled part, which is quite distinct. For whatever reason, Concarneau seems popular with German tourists, while most other busy places in Brittany have been busy with a lot of English people.
I had lunch at one of the port-side restaurants. It was busy and the service was slow, but I enjoyed my lunch. The glass of wine might have contributed to that! After a walk through the walled city, really just one street, I escaped through the fishing port.
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I wanted to get as far along my route to Carnac as I could today, but the GPS sent me down another muddy track. This is the route I created at home using RideWithGPS and I can't help but wonder how these tracks make it on to the base map. Today's was so overgrown in places it was hard to see that there was indeed a track there. I would have turned around, but the small roads aren't on my paper map and I couldn't tell on Garmin whether the "roads" shown there were any better than what I was on. And then I came upon a white van with the back and the driver's door open... I squeezed around it as quickly as possible. There was a clearing off to the right but I didn't slow down to look. After passing that I certainly wasn't turning around. I will say, though, that it isn't particularly unusual for people here to leave their car doors wide open while they run into a shop or whatever.
Once back on blessed pavement, it wasn't much further to Pont-Aven, where I bought dinner-picnic supplies and plotted a route to this campground. Like the one in Quimper, it has a lovely pool but it's just not swimming-pool weather. Speaking of weather, there were only occasional sprinkles today, so things are improving again.
Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 2,939 km (1,825 miles)
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