So in the last post, I left off with us heading to Brittany. Due to my keen detective skills, I was able to re-find the website of the place we stayed in Cancale, La Metairie du Vauhariot. As with all of our B&B's, we found the proprieter charming and the surroundings fantastic. This is Chris standing in the impressive stairwell, and this is where we had breakfast. Cancale was a really cool town, although like most places we visited, nearly empty in January. The food was amazing and (again, I'm guessing this is due to the off season) we had a 4 course meal, including 10 oysters apiece, wine and of course a cheese plate (!) for about $30 or $40! I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant, but it's a cute little place on a corner and it looks like this inside. The waiter/owner (I think he was the owner) loved Americans (imagine that!) and loved Vegas! He was telling us about his yearly Vegas/LA trip and how this year he was going to take his head chef. It was really sweet and the food was fabulous! Many of the restaurants we found in France served this great dish of steamed mussels, but in a creamy, rather than clear broth. The one we had here was the best mussel dish I've ever tasted, although I'm sure the cream made it entirely too unhealthy.
After we left Cancale, stopped by the medieval walled city of St. Malo, for a little visit before driving directly South through Brittany (Cancale is just to the East of St. Malo - at the very tip of the peninsula) to Vannes. St. Malo is really amazing - the whole city is really enclosed in walls. It was fun to just walk around in the narrow, winding streets and to walk on top of the wall around the city. I can't find my photos of it just now, but the walls go along a beach area and at one point, there is a pool ON THE BEACH. With a diving board! We had great, cheap paninis here before our drive South, proving apparently that if you're French, anything you cook will be good.
It took us a few hours to get to Vannes, where we stayed in a sort of boring, but convenient and parking lot equipped, Comfort Inn kind of place. The town was nice; a University town, again with the cobblestone and the cozy little streets - but we thought that if we had to do it over again (and in the same time span - 1 night in each place) we might skip it, as it wasn't too different from the other places we'd visited and it was a good drive to get there. The serendipitous thing about Vannes is that there was a new/used CD store in the town and in it Chris found a years old cd by a little known (I don't actually remember who she is) (not French) artist that he and his friend Will (who we would be staying with in Boston later during this trip) used to listen to during their cross country adventure about 5 or so years ago...So that part was really fun :)
After Vannes, and after driving along the coast that looked surprisingly like the coast of Maine, we left Brittany and headed into one of the great lands of wine...The Loire Valley. More to come...