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Published: April 16th 2018
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So it's Demat to you today - goodmorning in Breton. I had wondered how close good morning would be to the welsh version of Bore Da . Well I know now and it is nothing like it. I shall be looking for comparisons as we move deeper into Brittany.
Sometimes you don't want to leave your perfect spot. Sometimes it is just too nice. Lying in bed in Gabby listening to the church bells calling the faithful to mass I just want to lie there savouring the fact that we got off on holiday and here we are in La Belle France. The sun is shining and we feel a long way from home. We are not though just a few hours from the Tunnel. Britain is never too far away.
We do leave though. We have to. Although this holiday feels different to many others we have been on we still have to move on. There is only a Plan A and that is taking us to Nantes and to Guerande. After that it is Plan B. Although we don't have a Plan B. We are just going slowly this holiday giving ourselves some relaxation time, some time
to ourselves and some time to re-group. It is travel at a snails pace for a change.
That means we don't get up at the crack of dawn listening to the dawn chorus. It means we lie there listening to the sounds and thinking we will get up in a minute or two or three .......... We eat breakfast leisurely not looking at the clock. It does not matter whether we unplug the electric now or later. We can fill up with water slowly , have a cup of tea, empty the chemical toilet , have another drink before we set off. What a change for us and it is not a bad one.
The roads are quiet. It is Sunday morning. We are on the free motorways in this part of France. I wonder if that is because the French don't like paying on motorways and avoid them like the plague. At the risk of upsetting my French neighbours it seems they will go out of their way to go on an N road however long the journey turns out to be. We are always on a mission to get somewhere quickly so use the billiard table
smooth and empty motorways. Up here in Brittany there are few of them and we have to use the equally good dual carriageways.
The rain catches us up and the sky is grey as we travel slowly for us to our stop for the night . A 12 car aire in the lovely town of Fougeres.
We cross the Seine and see the bridges in the mist . They remind me of the bridge to the Isle of Sky rising up into the sky. These rise up into the mist and the rain. Are we going over those ? They look awfully steep and have to be to accommodate the traffic on the river a long way below us. What the French do well is to use the canals and the rivers . We don't use them preferring to clog up our motorways. They do build nice bridges but it takes our Norman Foster to build them the Millau.
They build wonderful aires. Green spaces with clean public toilets . Our service areas are few and far between. Dirty places with dirty toilets . The sort of places you drive by without stopping. The aire we stopped at for lunch was out in the middle of nowhere, Yet in a quiet corner was a war memorial. Now I am not one to pass a memorial by. I don't care which war it commemorates. They are all fascinating in their design, style and iconography. This one was brutal. A stone tower, It utilitarian with a French inscription round its base. It was in St Marcel that there was much resistance activity and the French SAS were involved in parachute landings around D Day. I wished I was able to read French but I cannot. Standing in front of it thought that didn't seem to matter. What mattered that I was there, that I appreciated what those young men did for me. As long as there is a memorial somewhere you will find me standing in front of it silent in my own thoughts.
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