Carnac

I can't even begin to catch up without sharing the story of our trip to Carnac - already four weeks ago.

To be honest, I've been behind with the blog because things have been very difficult for me at work, and I'm not one of those mentally healthy people who can completely remove themselves from their job when they go home every night. But that's another story for another post, and this story is supposed to be about happier times.

After our great trip to Barcelona to celebrate my 30th birthday last year, I hoped to make another escape for my less dramatic, but still upsetting 31st birthday. However, due to the aforementioned work troubles, I was completely distracted and the weekend of my birthday snuck up without us having made any plans. I whined to David that I really needed to get out of town, so he dug into the internet like a trooper and found us a little coastal town to spend the weekend (Point A).

Friday morning (I had a forced holiday from work and David took the day off) we boarded the C2 with the Tom Tom fired up. After a good five hours on the road, we found our hotel in the sleepy town of Carnac. In fact, "sleepy" is an understatement, as late winter is the low season for tourism, and thanks to school holidays, half of the town's permanent residents had taken off for ski vacations.

We ate in a local restaurant for dinner and I managed to negotiate a birthday dessert out of the waiter. Then we crashed after a long day in the car, but not before finishing "Breakfast at Tiffany's", which I started reading aloud on the drive. I bought the bi-lingual version of the novella - one page in English, one page in French - to help my language skills, but David was bored on the drive and bugged me to read him a few paragraphs in English. And that's how I ended up reading the entire story that day, and haven't touched the French version since.

Anyway, the next day we set out to see the sites of Carnac. Turns out that in the off-beach-season, the best thing to do is see the menhirs, which are a series of large standing stones. The stones of Carnac number more than 3000, and date from 3000-4500 BC. That's older than Stonehenge - at least that's what Wikipedia tells me.

We were fortunate to have beautiful weather, and lucky to visit in the cold months, because we learned that during the summer, tourists aren't allowed to walk amongst the stones to preserve the soil.

After walking amongst the lines of menhirs for a while, we decided to try one of the nature walks that the hotel had suggested. We drove out to Quiberon, a small peninsula not far from Carnac. On the map, it's the little nub that the yellow arrow is pointing to. There we walked along the "côte sauvage", or "wild coast", which was incredibly beautiful. It was the perfect antidote to any pent up frustrations we had from the week, and we spent a long time sitting quietly on the edge of a cliff, watching the sea.

Finally we decided to continue on and spend the last hours of daylight on a less savage coast. We drove to another scenic point, where we had a quiet stone beach nearly to ourselves. We picked our way over the rocks and watched the sun work its way down into dusk.

The next morning we wanted to get going right away to beat traffic, but stopped at a local market on our way out of town to get food for dinner. There I bought a cute French shopping basket, because the wheelie bag I bought in Paris doesn't really work out for our new place. The vendors were all very nice, and wished the Americans a bon voyage back to our country.

And we did have a bon voyage - back to our town, in our host country, at least.