ST. MALO AND DINAN

This was a fun day. It rained off and on all day, which was a bit of a pain, but not really all that bad. My fine thrift store poncho, which looks incredibly dorky, worked just fine. We had two events today, one an included tour of the town of St. Malo and the other a little trip to a town across the way called Dinand. 
St. Malo, where we went briefly yesterday afternoon and I got lost, is a charming walled city. It had a heyday as a shipping port in the 18^th century, importing spices, cloth, cacao, and coffee from Africa and the East, and occasionally gold from the new world.

We started with a tour of a little museum called the Corsair’s house. A Corsair was, or could be, a pirate. The difference between a corsair and a run of the mill pirate was that a corsair had a letter from the king saying it was all right to plunder and pillage, and you couldn’t be killed, whereas a regular old pirate had no such letter and could be killed. Our guide was the best one I’ve had on one of these trips because she was funny and generally kept your attention. In the picture, she’s showing us the tool corsairs used to climb aboard a ship and injure, but not kill people. The room had a couple of show-off public rooms for the owner to impress possible clients to buy his goods, and a small, totally sealed room accessed by a secret passage and a staircase that was about 1-1/2 feet wide to conduct real business.

Following that, we did a little walk around the town, visited the cathedral (which every one of our guides has insisted on explaining that just because it’s a big church it isn’t a cathedral if a bishop doesn’t preside there.) Most of St. Malo was destroyed during WWII by American bombs because the Nazis were there, but the American government paid to rebuild it, and thank you very much. And they restored it to the way it had been. I think the last piece of the restoration was finished in 1975. One of the "good" things that happened in the bombing was that a floor had been installed in the cathedral behind the altar at some past time, and no one knew that it was basically a false floor and the real floor was about 15 feet below it. Since the church was built into rock, when the bomb hit the church, it made a big hole which shouldn’t have been likely, and that’s how they discovered it.

She was going to show us the organ, because she is the organist in this church, but time got away from us.

At the end of our tour we stopped at a creperie and had a gallette, which is a flat crepe made with buckwheat and has something savory in it, in this case ham, emmenhalter cheese and mushrooms. Then we had a dessert crepe which had chocolate in it. We also had hard cider.

Following our tour of St. Malo, we crossed the bridge and stopped to see a power plant which is one of only two in the world built this way. It sits under a bridge and is built to capture both the incoming and the outgoing tide to make electricity. The bridge is between the river and the ocean, and is also a drawbridge and also has a lock incorporated into it. The tides here are about 12 feet every 12 hours, and I think we are here around a full moon.

Dinan is across the bay about 20 kilometers from St. Malo. It’s another charming old town with a wall around it, but its natural fortification of being more or less on a cliff meant that the wall is in some ways more for looks. We saw a nice church which was a Romanesque church but had a gothic front put on it when that became popular, but was still the stodgy roman style inside. It was quite dark in that end of the church, but a later gothic addition near the altar was bright because of the extra light.

It was raining a lot while we were here so we didn’t really do much walking, though we saw some of the architecture including some interesting looking wooden buildings. Then we were going to walk down the old commercial street that went to the docks, I think mostly to see how difficult it would have been to haul goods up from the docks, but I think she decided that we were too old and feeble to walk down the wet cobblestone street without one of us falling.

Finally we went down to another little tourist town that I suspect has never seen a tourist bus before. In fact this is a larger than usual bus, and our guides are continually asking the driver to go places I wouldn’t try to drive my Corolla. And he does it!! I think he’ll get a pretty good tip from the passengers for all his virtuoso driving. Anyway, we went to this little beach town, and the wind was howling and it was raining.

It was about 40 degrees out and there were 12 guys hotdogging in windsurfers out in the water. I really blew up a part of a picture of one of them, but it’s not that good.

beach at 5 p.m.

Our hotel is only a block from the beach, so when we got home I walked to town on the beach while Zoe took a nap. Then I went back two hours later, about 8 p.m. and took another picture on the beach trying to show the difference in the tide. I’d like to go out again now, but there’s a relatively complicated system for getting back into the hotel after 10 p.m., and I’m not sure I can manage it.

beach at 8 p.m.

Last night we had a wonderful dinner of moules and frites. Today we ate leftover cheese and crackers in our room. But we were through with dinner by 8 instead of our usual 9:30, which is probably why I’m usually so tired. I bought another box of macarons today. I love them. (We've already eaten half the box.)