Day 63: Binic to Val Andre

May 28, 2018

Binic was quite a quaint little town, and formerly the largest deep sea fishing harbour in France. The ships fished mainly in Newfoundland, and also supported import and export trade. Many of the interesting houses along the quay no doubt stem from traders and ship owners.

The hotel man seemed curiously laconic and while this may have been just his personality, I decided that he was having trouble understanding what I was babbling at him. I felt we had to talk about something, on the longish walk to go retrieve the bikes. I learned that the man is the owner of the hotel, and the chef too. In fact, it could be a one man show. I asked about when the bulk of tourists would arrive (July) and whether when they were cyclists he made this walk with them repeatedly (yes). Like I say, he did not say much.

We were a little dismayed to find that we had been charged 5 euros for the storing of the bikes, something that was not mentioned in Booking or by the man, until he presented the bill. It was not enough to make a fuss over, but it will pop up if we put a review into Booking.

Binic had one more little surprise for us. You have to climb a mountain to get out of the place. The signage rather fondly called it "The Mountain", and they think people will have fun roving all over it. It contains an archeological site, because it is felt it could have been the location of a Roman encampment.

We considered following the "wheelchair" route, since that accorded more with how we felt today, but we decided that this did not really go where we needed to be. So we took the bike route, quickly becoming lost. The GPS came to the rescue and we succeeded in leaving Binic!

There used to be about 450 km of narrow gauge railroad in this area, and we benefited from two rather long and tall trestle bridges that lay along the current cycle route. In our home province there have also been projects to restore and use railway bridges for the benefit of cyclists and walkers, but it is costly and always traumatic for the governments involved. The same must be true here, for they were sure to post an accounting of how much had been spent - in this case 700,000 euros, split between the

Departement and the region. Another panel seemed to quote a further, similar figure, with contribution from the EU as well. I am not sure if this is additional, but the message is the same - a willingness to invest money into cycling infrastructure. Good!

The route is taking us up an down to little ports, which usually offer the somewhat disconcerting sight of lots of small boats stranded by low tide, or in other cases a nice basin filled with happily floating boats. In all cases the boats and harbours have been mostly for pleasure.

But at Plerin there was more of a real working harbour. This was actually a bit uncomfortable as we had to contend with some large vehicles (like cranes) on the roadway. We had read (in our famous map set) about the Coquilles St Jacques in the bay here, which produces half of the French harvest of these famous shellfish. But the season is November to March, and even then the boats can only go out for 45 minutes twice a week to conserve the stocks. So it figures that we did not see any piles of Coquilles.

Naturally we had to climb to get out of the harbour, and this time we had one of the steepest slopes we have contended with. As always, photos do not show just how steep it is, but this one - shot looking back from the top - might give some idea, if you look at the road just getting ready to dive down to the harbour beside what is actually a disused chateau.

About 8 km beyond the harbour, our route intersects with the regional route eight, which takes off south - crossing through Pontivy and ending up at Lorient, 130 km up the coast from St. Nazaire and the Loire. This would be the way home for Hugues and Eric, who we had met going our way, two days back.

We passed the intersection of our route and route 8 and carried on toward the town of Hillion. But here, charging up from behind us, came Hugues and Eric! They had spotted us in the distance, recognizing our Da Brims. They said they had no doubt since these are the only two yellow hats like that in France.

Naturally we brought each other up to date on all that had happened in the last two days. One night there had been a huge storm and we asked how they had made out, since they were camping. Fortunately they were at a farm camping and had been able to put their tent under a shelter. One comment they made was that the official website (on francevelotourisme.com) for the route we were on lists the sections hereabouts as "Expert". Of course we don't know if that designation refers to the hills, the traffic, or a combination of that and other factors, but it seemed impressive anyway.

Eric (and Hugues) raced up to say goodbye, before taking the road back south

Bye guys, bonne route. We hope to get a comment from you here in the blog.

On other days, the flowers or the marine environment have really caught our attention here in Brittany, but today it seemed the houses took precedence. Of course, they have been a big factor all along, but today it seems every place is a beautiful old stone house. We have to admit, especially looking out our window right now, that there are actually plenty of beautiful solid white houses, but the stone ones really stood out.

Among the stone houses there are also different styles. The obvious variations are houses with brick detailing, with stone details on white walls, with stones of different shapes and colours, and with pointing that is thick or thin, and of different colours. It also seems that the detailed style differences vary by sub regions. We don't really know what we are looking at, but we know for sure that there is little or nothing like this where we come from. That of course is what one travels for.

Because we had been so tired yesterday after the many hills, we lowered our sights again and only planned to get to Val Andre, a trip of about 50 km. Maybe that was too low, because we arrived about 3 p.m. That gave us the chance to go look at downtown nearby Pleneuf and to go find the Tourist Information, which turned out to be in the bit of Val Andre by the beach.

The Tourist Information, after a bit of digging, did come up with all five maps in the "La Littorale" series, in English. It's too bad in a way, because now our quest is over. But as far as Tourist Informations go, we know we will have new quests as we continually look for large scale maps of small regions - the type of thing you could never carry from home.

The Tourist Information quest had also brought us to a beautiful beach. Sailboats adorned the distance, and people walked on a vast expanse of sand. Over to one side, houses climbed a hill side. Also, along the water frontage, beautiful houses were lined up. These were reminiscent of the Belle Epoch houses of Soulac and Royan, or the remaining vacation houses that are found on the Normandy beaches.

We continued to gawk at the buildings as we left the beach and ascended just a bit to our Chambre d'Hote, the "Au Gai Sejour", run by Serge and Annette. This is a very cute couple of about our age, who were very solicitous in explaining all the details needed for our stay. One thing we really liked, of course, was that the bikes went into a real garage joined to the house. Interestingly, the garage also housed a large tractor - but Serge did not look like a farmer. The explanation is that he uses it on the beach to move his boat around at low tide and to winch the boat onto land from where it may be floating.

bikes are sharing with this tractor tonight.

Annette led us to our room, saying that since we were the only guests tonight she would upgrade us to the larger room. The larger room still featured only two feet of space surrounding the bed, but it did have a little desk and chair, which are serving perfectly here for writing the blog. The room is decorated with lots of knick knacks and it has padded, flocked, flowered wallpaper. It is most like a girl's bedroom and makes me a little nervous. Dodie loves it.

That white thing is a towel in the shape of a swan, wearing a feather boa. We had to find a spot to put it where it would not get wrecked. The actually very functional desk is in the background.

Postscript: Strawberries and Cherries

When we started this trip we were in the north in early Spring. As we cycled, the season advanced both with the passage of time and with our progress toward the south. We watched the daffodils finish and the tulips and lilacs bloom. Most frustrating was looking at the huge number of cherry trees in Provence, but none with ripe cherries yet. However we were there for strawberries to be ready - two months earlier than we are used to back home.

Now that we are back north, and in maritime Brittany, the cherries (such as there are) are just little green balls, while we know from the Bartlett's blog that they are ripe in Provence. Darn. But hey, we are here to see strawberries come ready - all over again.

Today just by Hillion we came upon a lady picking strawberries in a large field. Thinking it might be a u-pick we asked her about it. It turned out that this was her son's farm and that he was in yonder truck packing up the harvest. We headed on over, and for three and a half euros scored two boxes of totally fresh and ripe berries. That's even better than stumbling onto a market.

Today's ride: 54 km (34 miles)
Total: 4,201 km (2,609 miles)

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