Glennis and Mike are leaving today to go to Brest for a night and then to fly to Madrid so they hired a car for Greg to drive them to Brest. We mostly stayed on the coastal road visiting several beautiful old towns with charming stone houses and other buildings and a central plaza, usually faced by the town hall and one or two large churches the towns included Paimpol (with many impressive two-storey stone houses with steeply pitched roofs), Lezardrieux (with a wide central plaza area bisected by a row of big flower pots and flower baskets hanging from the buildings on each side and the village church at the end), Treguier (with a church spire so high that it is pierced with multi-patterned holes to reduce wind resistance - this village is where we found another excellent butcher and bought more meat), Perros-Guirec (a resort town with two large sandy beaches and a marina basin that looks like a large swimming pool for the boats - the tide was out so we could see the high brick wall around the marina holding the water in), Lannion (set on an estuary with fishing boats tied up along the high brick walls even though it is a fair way inland), St-Michel-en-Greve ( spread out along a very long sandy beach with some very keen windsurfers braving the extremely cold weather and others speeding along on sand yachts) and Roscoff, before heading directly for Brest. We had lunch at a creperie at Perros-Guirec, enjoying one of the specialties of Brittany - gallettes, a big square savoury pancake with fillings of choice (e.g. I had ham and cheese and Greg had bacon, onions, cheese and a poached egg). Our main purpose for going to Roscoff was to check out the suitability of the marina because that is probably going to be our next stop. Of course we checked out every other marina on the way. Roscoff is a town where ferries travel to and from England and Ireland and is a very pretty resort town so we had excellent espresso coffee and Mille Fieulle pastry for afternoon tea in a Salon du The ( sorry I cannot type the acute over the letter e). We finally headed for Brest, checked out the marinas there, preparing for our possible stopover on Wednesday night, and took Glennis and Mike to their hotel before heading for home at 7.15 pm. It was a 1.45 hours drive for Greg so just as well it stays light until about 10.30 pm at present.
We are very pleased to have had the opportunity to explore more of the countryside and villages we would never go to in our boat. This part of France is beautiful and certainly has better beaches than the French coast in the Mediterranean areas, but they do not have the warm climate to suit those beaches. I suppose that's part of what keeps it more charming in a rustic sort of way, but the small businesses in the villages and towns are suffering because it is several years since they have had a good summer, which brings tourists and money to the area. There are many beautiful holiday homes up for sale at very low prices, a sign of the recession and the prolonged bad weather. This is also a part of France that is not glamorous, with people not worrying about wearing the most fashionable clothes, so it is quite a different area for us to see.