Etape 19 St Omer Blain to Redon

Chambre d’hote breakfasts are different from hotel breakfasts. They are usually more focussed on homemade jams and honeys, homemade bread and homemade panacottas or yoghurts. This morning’s was no exception and although it was all very tasty and beautifully prepared it lacked the gut busting range of cheeses, hams and eggs that the calorie-burning cyclist needs to kick start the day.

The chambre d’hote hostess was charming and went into full detail of how she makes the breads, the cider-based jams, the mini orange cakes, and the yoghurts and watches carefully as you are eating it to make sure you are pulling the appropriately appreciative faces and handing out plentiful compliments.

It was all delightful but by 2pm we were seeking out a suitable patisserie to buy a couple of hearty quiches to keep us going till dinnertime!

For most of the day we bowled along Le Nantes-Brest Canal which is becoming increasingly tiresome. Mile after mile of gravelly towpath beneath the trees sometimes in a straight line for a disspiriting couple of miles. Not a huge amount of wildlife to be seen but the occasional heron, cormorant, coot, red kites (the type without the kid attached at the end of a string) and ragondins (or coypu to you and me – large herbivorous semi-aquatic rodent.) We like to spend time looking for these creatures and enjoying their riverside antics. The lady from the chambre d’hote says the locals like to turn them into pate!! True! Only the French can turn a river rat into pate. Here’s one – alive, not a pate version!

So there was mile after mile of this:

And many more miles of this;

The highlight of the day was spotting the canal dredger ( that’s how boring it was). It was sitting all alone in the shallows with no driver. In fact we wondered how the driver got into it given the fact that it was off shore by several feet. Doeshe bring his own little boat to get to it? A large set of waders? Or does he just do a Gallic shrug and get his trousers wet. We will never know ‘cos he didn’t turn up when we were there. Also this machine has caterpillar tracks. Does it crawl along the canal bed or get hoisted onto a barge. Again we will never know and I ain’t coming back to find out.

Arrived in Redon just in time to see the bride arrive at the church for her wedding. She was delivered to the church in a horn-blaring car that looked like this.

Think it must have been a local farmer girl. She did have the white dress and all so it wasn’t all Hicksville!!

Met an English blocke in a bar tonight who was cycling on his own for a week with no specific plan. Want sure if he was going to La Rochelle or turning left into the Loire Valley. He had also landed at Roscoff and then cycled 90 miles the first day but only 55 the second because it was raining!!

We slunk off in shame when we told him it would take us 5 days to go that far!! Hey ho but on we go!