Etape 18 Nantes to St Omer Blain

Went for a quick spin round Nantes Cathedral before heading north out of town.

The current Cathedral is mostly 15th century and took only 450 years to build (must have been a Carillion project)!It is constructed of a combination of granite and limestone from the Loire valley which makes it quite a clean looking structure internally. The present church was built on the site of an earlier 3rd century chapel which was originally built ‘… to house a nail from the cross of St Peter’ !! ( sounds like a good enough reason to start a 500 year building programme!)

It has the allegedly the tallest stained glass window in all of France but no-one knows what happened to the very old rusty nail. It is certainly not on display along with all the other relics.

For the rest of the day we scooted along 40 miles of the Nantes-Brest Canal and ended up here in St Omer Blain. The French have got us Brits to thank for this lovely canal because we kindly blockaded their port at Brest in 1783 forcing Napoleon III to commission a navigable waterway between his two biggest Atlantic military ports. It only took them 47 years to build and it was completed in 1858. For canal nerds it is 360km long and has 238 locks and there are now only a few leisure craft still pootling up and down to keep the lock keepers from going demented. Most of keepers seem to spend their time tending their flowers in order to win some annual best flowery lock award.

We stopped for a beer at one small lockside bar which was all very jolly and charming in the sun. We had just sat down and got our beers delivered when a minivan turned up and disgorged about 10 oldsters with their carers. The lady who ran the bar said that they come about twice a week for a trip out from their old folks home and enjoy sitting under the big tree watching the extremely infrequent boats going through the lock.

I don’t think many of them knew what day of the week it was and it took them over half an hour to decide who wanted coffee, who wanted an apero and who wanted ice cream. The kindly waitress looked on benignly as if this total indecision was standard practice for this group of oldies. We left them after half an hour still trying to decide what flavour of ice cream they all wanted. But this was all part of the fun and it didn’t stop them having a jolly nice time thankyou very much.

Mustn’t mock. I’ll be joining them soon except it will trying to decide over tea or coffee and which cake would be best to suck on now that my teeth have all gone whilst watching supermarket trollies float past in the rain in the Forth and Clyde canal at Maryhill.

Can’t wait !!