Good-bye Brittany, a giant dolmen, and foie gras

Day 5 France 2012

For breakfast, we have a nice assortment of breads...the greyish cracker-like bread is British, the little round bread to the left of it is a Breton bread...very crispy, and even Patrick (our host) says it is not very tasty.  Then we have croissants and baguettes.  There  is a table at the back of the dining room with cereals, yogurt, fruit, boiled eggs, cheeses, and applesauce.  We have had a different jam...all homemade...every day.  Coffee for Leon, tea for me, and orange juice.  We are stuffed when we finish. 

 At breakfast this morning, a British couple came in, and the wife asked if we were French or English.  We laughed and said that we were neither, we were American.  We had a nice chat with them.  He is a retired professor from Devon, and they had taken the ferry across from Plymouth.  They were just delightful to talk with, and we enjoyed the exchange of travel tales.  The wife told me that she had seen photos in an album in the reception area of what our hotel looked like before it was restored and turned into the hotel.  I tried to take some photos of the photos in the album.  It was unbelievable how the place has been transformed.

And here are more views of what it looks like today:

After breakfast, as we loaded the car, we met another couple in the parking lot.  They were from San Diego, had just bought a condo in Branson, and this was their first trip to France.  They love Italy and had just come from the Cinque Terre area and related progress on rebuilding after last year’s devastating flood there.  I had been keeping up with it through Rick Steves’ blog. They had found out about our hotel through Rick’s book just as we had.

We programmed Helen to take us to Esse, home to the largest dolmen in all of France.  We would never have found it without her help because the dolmen was way out in the country.  In fact, after we drove up in the parking lot, we still didn’t see it.  We asked a couple who were lunching in the shade of a tree, and the lady smiled and pointed around in a clump of trees to this huge pile of rocks.  We had driven right past it, too, since it is right beside the road, just hidden by a hedge.  I am sure that the French think that Americans are just too dumb!  There was a group of school children having a picnic under the trees beside the dolmen.  They were having a great time.  I don’t think that they were in awe of the historical significance of the place like Leon and I were.

As we were driving down this small country road to the dolmen, we noticed a sign that said Foie Gras…Ferme du Mee.  Leon decided it would be fun to get some foie gras and visit the farm.  It made Helen unhappy for us to deviate from where she wanted us to go, but we back-tracked to the farm and saw a typical French farm, a flock of ducks (this was canard foie gras and not oie foie gras), and some sheep.  We went in and a young lady in a white apron was inside the shop.  We bought some of her foie gras and as we were walking out the door, we saw a wooden shoe hanging on the wall.  Leon remembers a story from his childhood about a little boy from Brittany, and he wore wooden shoes.  Leon has told me this story time and again as we mentioned going to Brittany.  Well, there on the wall was a wooden shoe.  We asked about it, and the lady said that it had belonged to her grandfather and that he had worn them when he worked on the farm.  We had to get a photo of her and her granpere’s shoe.

We headed south again and crossed the Loire River near Nantes.  We stopped at a LeClerc and got picnic food for lunch (baguettes for 45 cents), some wine  for this evening, and a corkscrew.  We have a hard time getting a corkscrew in and out of Europe on the plane, so just buy a new one when we get here these days.  The farther south we get, house styles change.  Houses here have red tile roofs.  We also saw more wind turbines…8-9 in a group, and we saw several groups of them.  Wheat fields are everywhere and many fields are being tilled up and planted.  It has been sunny only the last 3 days.  The British couple we met said that England had had the rainiest April on record and May is almost a record.  I had been keeping up with weather in Paris, and it has been very rainy in France, too.  I imagine that the farmers are happy to have good farming weather.

We are spending tonight in Niort, a rather nondescript French town.  We stopped here just because it was a good distance from Rigourdaine.  There is a lot of construction right in front of the hotel and in fact, the street in front is closed.  It really upset Helen that the road was closed because she kept trying to get us to drive down that street and no matter how many times we told her it was closed, she just kept trying to get us to turn around and go down that same street.  It looks like they have made a big underground parking lot across the street, and they are turning the streets into pedestrian walkways, and eventually it will be a wonderful park area.  

 This church is at the end of the street from our hotel.

Just a funny aside from Helen…we drove by Angers (Ahn-zher) and Helen called it ang-ers.  We laughed and laughed.  I think she might be from Arkansas!