France, Day 10, 8/31/2012

We have a busy day. We go to a laundromat, where the proprietor, who happens to be there painting the walls, gives us directions in English. (And we needed them, too! It was a very confusing laundromat.) While our clothes wash and dry, we have coffee at le Bar Tarmac (it had an airplane theme), and then go see the old town's ramparts. They aren't as massive as Saint-Malo's, but they're impressive nonetheless. We hike up Mont-Frugy (not a real mountain) looking for a nice place to picnic, but we come back down and eat at its foot when we can't find a sunny spot. After lunch, we look at some pottery (Quimper has been a center of pottery for a long time) and check out the 11th century church of Locmaria.

Outside of Locmaria.

A stream in Quimper.

After another stroll around the old town, we go to the Breton museum and see art, artifacts, clothes, and furniture from Brittany, from prehistoric times to the 1920s. We stop at a bar with lots of Breton beers, and we both get little, 1/4-liter glasses.

For dinner, we go to Chez Max, a very nice looking bistro hidden in a courtyard. When we ask the server what something is on the menu, she brings over an English speaking waitress who tells us (it was clams). Unfortunately, she then proceeds to translate the rest of the menu for us at length. We share six stuffed clams, chewy but delicious. I get a faux-filet (beef tenderloin?), also chewy but delicious, and it comes with a sauce that seems to be roasted garlic and other vegetables in oil. It also comes with fries, excellent roasted vegetables (zucchini and carrots), and a little salad. Lindsay gets moules frites, which are much worse than the muscles we've been eating, fishier and not as sweet. We swap halfway through as usual.

For dessert, I get a pear with Fourme d'Ambert, a truly delicious blue cheese that I ate twice a day last year in Saint-Flour. The pear is whole and is baked in a thin crunchy sheet of pastry, along with the cheese. It's not sweet at all—in fact, it comes with a salad. It would have been nicer with some element of sweetness, whether honey or just a riper pear. Lindsay gets the Breton cake with a scoop of buckwheat and a scoop of vanilla ice cream. Our waitress dutifully translated all the ice cream flavors for us, something not exactly required for words like vanille and chocolat. The cake is dense and dry—I've never had a gateau Breton before, so I'm not a good judge, but I don't think it was supposed to be so dry—but the ice cream is delicious.

France, Day 9, 8/30/2012

For the first time, we move on to the next place by train and not by foot. My legs feel normal again! For most of the trip, I've felt sore but fine, but yesterday my legs had actually started to hurt. We loved the hiking on the trip even though we didn't prepare ourselves physically in any way, relying on our youth and general fitness. If I ever do this again, I'll go hiking a few times before with a heavy bag so that the muscles in my ankles and legs that go unused in my regular life don't get such a shock.

We planned our trip with the help of David Lewis, who told us that the essential thing was to get a Topoguide from FFRandonée. We planned our trip and then ordered the Topoguide (which came very quickly, by the way). This is really the opposite of what we should have done: choose the general region, order the Topoguide, and then plan the trip. The guide tells you things like which towns have train stations, bus stations, places to stay, and places to get food. They also provide some suggestion of which tourist destinations you'll want to see. Our Topoguide, for example, was called "Chemin vers le Mont-Saint-Michel" which might have clued us in that our route narrowly missed the town of Mont-Saint-Michel. If Saint-Malo was, say, a two star destination, then Mont-Saint-Michel deserved something like eight stars. Or so it seemed, since we never actually went there. We eventually started lying to French people when they asked us if we were going to Mont-Saint-Michel because if we said we weren't they'd look at us incredulously and start plotting how we should get to it (it wasn't feasible to work it into our trip after we arrived). And this is the explanation of how we came to visit the area surrounding Mont-Saint-Michel without visiting the place itself.

The closest we came to Mont-Saint-Michel, back on the second day of our trip. The camera is zoomed all the way and the picture is cropped, so it's even farther than it looks.

After one last coffee with steamed milk (UHT, i.e., the kind that tastes funny and never goes bad, and the only kind we ever saw) at our friendly café, we're off to the train station. Our train stops in Rennes, and there's enough time to walk to the old town, sit down for a few minutes, and walk back. Then we board a train to Quimper and eat the provisions we got in Saint-Malo: a wonderful boule au levain; some hard salami, flavored with garlic; a vegetable tarte of carrots and leeks baked in eggs and cream; a soft, unctuous cheese; and a carrot salad with an excellent dressing (orange juice and olive oil?); and a kouign amann (not as good as the one we had in Cancale, unfortunately).

We arrive in beautiful Quimper in the early afternoon. We stay at l'Hôtel de la Gare, conveniently across the street from the train station (that's la gare). We notice that all the street signs are in French and Breton, which looks like Welsh.

Our ambition for the day is to visit a cidery. There's one just outside of town, but it's too hard to get there by bus. So, we splurge and take a taxi to la Cidrerie Manoir du Kinkiz, where they make cider and also distill it into brandy. They have a little exhibit on the history of the local distilling methods. The employee at the distillery takes us around and translates for us. Then she gives us a tasting. I'm most excited to try their lambig, cider distilled to 80 proof and aged in oak barrels. The same basic thing made in Normandy is Calvados. We also try pommeau, which is one part lambig and three parts cider, aged together. It's a pleasant, slightly sweet drink intended as an aperitif. We also try some fruit liquors that they make using the fruit of other local growers.

Then we go over to the cidery, where we taste the three ciders they produce: a very dry, lightly bubbly one from Fouesnant; a dry, bubblier one that's AOC Cournauille; and a lighter, sweeter one made from a single variety of apple and intended to be drunk before or after a meal, as the woman who was pouring explained to us in perfect English. My favorite was the Fouesnant, Lindsay's the Cournauille. These ciders are fermented briefly in metal vats (not wood) and finish in the bottle. They're meant to be drunk immediately, and if they're not, they can start to taste funny, lose their fizz, or explode. They're very refreshing and still taste like apples even though they're dry, and they're only about five percent alcohol. We bring home a few bottles of cider, a bottle of lambig, and some crème de cassis.

Quimper's old town is nice, and it's less overwhelmingly touristy than Saint-Malo's. (Saint-Malo's old town is beatiful but sort of like a theme park.)

Toby illuminated

We have dinner at Erwan, where the proprietor, Erwan, waits on all the tables. The restaurant has many Breton dishes, which are unfortunately written on the menu only in Breton, but we get them translated into a mix of French and English. Erwan even throws in some German, which is not helpful. We start with fish soup, and sardines with carrots and cabbage fried in a thin dough wrapper. The fish soup is great. It's reddish brown with no large chunks of anything, but with a coarse texture from little bits of fish. It comes with rouille, toasts, and cheese. It's less rich than the soup we had at les Embruns, but much more flavorful, tasting of fish and warm spices.

As main courses we get two Breton dishes: cod in cider butter, and pork with potatoes. The pork is a sausage, spareribs, and shoulder and is as big as it sounds. Both dishes come with a bit of zucchini stewed with tomatoes. Everything is very good, though we can't eat it all. We also get a great bottle of cider.

At another table, we see three people get dessert while the other person at the table, an older man, gets a bowl of fish soup.

Addresses:
Erwan
3 Rue Aristide Briand
29000 Quimper, France

France, Day 8, 8/29/2012

After some Reine Claude plums and coffee at our local bar, which we've become very fond of, we go see the old town of Saint-Malo. We end up for lunch at a fast food crêperie called Breizh Food. I get a galette with egg and country ham, and Lindsay gets one with poitrine (smoked pork belly?) and cheese. Both are good, though the crêpes don't have that fermented tang that we've come to expect.

Old Saint-Malo.

Clouds and rain dash our beach hopes, so we stay in our hotel until we make a late afternoon visit to our cafe to sit and read. We go to dinner at le Bacchus, where we ate lunch the other day. They have a €20 prix-fixe (my guess is that they only have it when there aren't tons of tourists around). There are two choices for each course, so we get to have it all. First is a gratin of chanterelle mushrooms, and two fried eggroll shells stuffed with stewed beef (a way of using up leftovers, I guess). Both dishes come with a slightly overdressed salad of nice mesclun. The mushrooms are delicious: the dish was basically just them, seasoned and cooked in cream.

The two main courses were kidneys in a rich, mushroom sauce, and some kind of white fish à l'ancienne: mashed with potatoes and baked, like we had in Cancale, but this one was much better. Our server spent a long time trying to demonstrate what kidneys were so we knew what we were getting ourselves into.

For dessert we had a chocolate pot de crème and a vacherin with (raspberry?) coulis and crème anglaise. The vacherin was basically a really good ice cream cake, with layers of fluffy frozen icing (I think) and meringue.

After the meal, our waitress (possibly the owner) talks to us and seems very confused as to how we found the restaurant. She points at a Tripadvisor.com sticker and asks if that's why we came. We explain in our best French that our hotel was around the corner, and we just saw it as we walked by.

France, Day 7, 8/28/2012

After breakfast we hike to Saint-Malo, arriving by 12:15. This hike is muddy in spots, but very pretty. Parts of it look like they'd be impassible at high tide, but the timing works out for us and we don't need to wait.

On the way to Saint-Malo.

For lunch, we go to a nice restaurant near our hotel called le Bacchus, which has a great lunch deal: 10 euros for either of two dishes. I get a filet of cod, sitting on a bed of zucchini and other vegetables in a green sauce, with a little disc of shredded potatoes and onion (and fennel? cabbage?). Lindsay gets the other dish, dug leg confit with delicious yellow fries in thick wedges. The interior of the restaurant is a sickening mix of lavender and pink; flowery motifs abound, and orchids are scattered everywhere. A restaurant like this would look completely different in the U.S.! It would be decorated like a barn or have exposed brick walls or something.

Then we go to the beach! The weather is less cooperative than yesterday, so we stay out of the water. The beach is filled with kids who don't mind the cold and splash around happily. After we go back to the hotel and take showers, we go to a slightly seedy bar/newsstand for afternoon drinks. Lindsay has a kir royale (sparkling wine with cassis) and I have a pastis, a milky anise-flavored liquor that comes with a pitcher of water to dilute it. I think I got the worst brand of pastis, because it tastes like liquified Good-and-Plenties.

As we look for dinner, all the restaurants look like variations on each other. We go to the one that looks the least touristy, Les Embruns, even though it's slightly more expensive than the others. When we go in, we see that it's much fancier than we expected. There are white tablecloths; the servers wear black and white uniforms.

We get the cheapest prix fixe meal (22 euros) and the cheapest carafe of white wine (from the Luberon), and we are rewarded with a terrific meal. Our server is extremely professional, and service that would feel stuffy at home is natural and fun here. I get fish soup with a platter of rouille, gruyère, and toasts. Lindsay gets crab remoulade, crab and celery root in mayonnaise (or maybe it was just a thick vinaigrette?) with dill. We are both given an amuse-bouche of a single oyster. I get a filet of haddock in a basil sauce with delicious mashed potatoes. Lindsay gets choucroute de la mer, a big plate of braised sauerkraut with a few mussels and three pieces of fish (salmon, smoked whitefish, and some sort of unsmoked whitefish).

Lindsay gets a plate with a few different desserts: a tiny ramekin of crème brûlée, a piece of layer cake, a little scoop of some sort of nut ice cream, and a berry sorbet. I get the cheese plate, which has camembert, a tomme, and a soft cheese whose name I couldn't understand. We go back to our hotel somewhat surprised at the meal we got, and very happy.

Addresses:
Le Bacchus
102 Avenue Pasteur
35400 Saint-Malo

Les Embruns
120 Chaussée du Sillon
35400 Saint-Malo

France, Day 6, 8/27/2012

Our room is amazing:

A marble fireplace.

A bedside table with a marble top, and Lindsay's feet.

For lunch, we go back to the only place in town for a buckwheat crêpes with melted cheese for Lindsay, and with sausage for Toby. Lindsay also gets a sweet crêpe, and I get an okay fruit salad.

The clouds clear and we go to the beach (not the nude one from yesterday—there's a line of rocks that marks the start of clothes). It's a beautiful day, and we sit in the sun reading and then brave the cold English channel.

We have a plan for the evening: we'll walk four kilometers to Saint-Coulomb in the afternoon, sit in a cafe until dinner, go to a restaurant, and then take a taxi back to la Guimorais. But when we get to Saint-Coulomb, we find out that it only has one restaurant, which is closed on Monday! (Saint-Coulomb is nicer than this would make you think. It has many pretty stone buildings; a bakery; several butchers, one of whom was also selling prepared food that looked good; and a "municipal restaurant," open only for lunch. Further inspection revealed that the municipal restaurant was attached to the elementary school, and presumably makes lunch for the kids. Wouldn't it be nice if school lunches were available to the general public and worth buying in your town?)

So, we walk all the way back to la Guimorais and beyond to the shore, where a restaurant called la Perle Noire serves tourists. It's pretentious—the menu has items like "un caprice de foie gras" and "une trilogie d'agneau"—but it's not so bad, and it has a pretty view. Our waiter is young and very nice, and he fits the cliché of bumbling waiter. When he delivers our bottle of cider, he can't get the cork out. After much effort, it pops off and lands on me. He brings us a basket of bread with a big flourish, only to snatch it away when he realizes that he meant it for the next table over. I watch him carry off a tray of empty bottles from another table while making jerking motions in fear of a bee and knocking over the bottles. All of his mistakes are harmless and only make us happier. Lindsay gets mussels in curry, and I get a hamburger, which is pink and juicy in the middle. We stop at our old friend the crêperie on our way back, where I get a scoop of salted butter caramel ice cream and Lindsay of currant sorbet.

France, Day 5, 8/26/2012

Today is our day of epic hiking. The coast and the weather are beautiful, and we make it to the Pointe de Grouin after three hours. We are rewarded with our first glimpse of water outside the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.

Us with the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel in the background.

Around the Pointe de Grouin

A fortified island off the coast

After another 45 minutes, we come to a beach where we sit and devour our lunch: some sliced salami, from a log whose diameter is big enough that meat along the exterior is much chewier than in the interior; two kinds of Breton cheese; a can of sardines in extra virgin olive oil with aromatic vegetables; bread; a green pepper; and a packaged madeleine that our bed and breakfast's proprietor gave us. We eat and eat, read for a while, and finally we get up and hike. I don't even feel a little bit full.

Then we hike for another three and a half hours. When we're almost there, we lose the trail! It's never marked well around beaches. This beach is nude, as we discover peering down from the cliffs above it, so maybe the maintainers of the trail were distracted. We're both exhausted—the hike isn't cardiovascularly taxing, but our joints and tendons were not prepared for this—but I go ahead without my backpack and find a blaze. We were walking the right way the whole time. I go back and happily tell Lindsay, and we walk on into la Guimorais, a tiny town of stone buildings. We find our bed and breakfast and collapse there.

There's only one restaurant in la Guimorais, and we're not willing to walk anywhere, so we go there. We start with kirs (white wine with crème de cassis), which come with a little tray of peanuts. I get a steak with fries and a salad. Lindsay gets a mushroom galette (buckwheat crêpe), and a ham omelette with fries and a salad, to the surprise of the waitress (we were very hungry!). We also get a little carafe of cider. Nothing is really good except for the galette, but bad in France is much better than bad in the U.S., and everyone at the restaurant is incredibly nice to us, and we're so exhausted and hungry that we just have a great time. We finish all of our food and get dessert: a crêpe with apricot jam for Lindsay and a scoop of coffee ice cream and of "antillaise" ice cream for me. I got the second scoop to figure out what it was. As I discovered, it's rum raisin.

France, Day 4, 8/25/2012

In the morning we walk around the part of Cancale away from the shore. There's not much there besides houses, but we find this cemetery:

For lunch, we sit in the grass eating bread (a baguette au levain) and our remaining cheese. We also have celery root rémoulade and mushrooms à la Grecque, little button mushrooms in a vinegary pureed tomato sauce with onions and parsley. The rémoulade, made with mayonnaise, wasn't as good as Julia Child's vinaigrette-based recipe, but the mushrooms were tasty. We also have terrific reine claude plums (which I learn now are greengage plums in English). They have green flesh and a soft, creamy texture.

Then it's on to an oyster facility. (Lindsay and I have always enjoyed shellfish tourism.) Here we go on a tour (in English) and learn how oysters are farmed. The native flat oyster was originally so plentiful that people got all they wanted just by picking them up at low tide. Then, they started trawling the ocean floor for them. By the 18th century, they were starting to run low, and no one could figure out how to farm them. People eventually managed to farm a Portuguese variety of oyster, all of which died in a blight in 1962. Now, they farm a Japanese variety. The original flat oysters are still around and are now farmed, but they cost twice as much since it's harder to do. I would have liked to try these, but you can only get them in cold months because so many of them die out of the water if it's warm. The tour is fun. The only other people on it are a family from Hong Kong. The father is a real oyster aficionado, asking the tour guide's opinion on how Breton oysters stack up against the ones from Normandy, Japan, and both coasts of the U.S.

We sit down again at our cafe on the main square around the church in Cancale in the late afternoon. We are really becoming accustomed to this afternoon break. This time, I get a Breton dark beer called Telenn Du (yes, the French make beer!) and Lindsay gets a Perrier. We're sitting outside with our drinks when it suddenly starts raining hard, and everyone runs inside. Then it stopped and got sunny, and then it rained for another few minutes.

Toby with his Breton beer.

For dinner, we've made a reservation at Au Jardin du Bourg, whose niche is to be the restaurant that doesn't just serve piles of seafood by the seashore. For 12.50 euros, I have terrine de campagne (a coarse paté served with cornichons), a cassoulette of fish baked with vegetables and cream, and a chocolate and pear tarte. Lindsay has a salad with lettuce and a ham and chevre toast, steak, and chocolate mousse. Everything is good, especially the juicy, flavorful, chewy steak. I get a digestif of Calvados, which I wanted to try because I was planning to bring some home. [I ended up bringing home something slightly different, though.] The restaurant gives us free tiny glasses of amaretto, and we go home very happy.

Addresses:
Au Jardin du Bourg
6 Rue Duquesne
35260 Cancale