London/Germany/France

I am writing this in January 2013, so, it’s somewhat old news, but, I thought maybe a few pictures of our travels might be interesting.

As planned, we were still based in London in June and still trying to get out and about town on various walks. We did a nice Grand Union canal walk where sometimes it’s hard to imagine you’re in the heart of the city.

Cygnets hitching a ride

A canal boat with feline crew

During June, A was hard at work on an assignment in Bonn, Germany. G was able to visit for a weekend and we had a really nice day out on the Rhine. We took the train (which travels at 300 km hour!) and got the tour boat from Mainz to Cologne. It was an all day trip through the most scenic part of the Rhine, including the fast stretch around Bingen, Lorelei Rock and the stretch where banks are lined with famous vineyards and turreted castles.

View on the Rhine

Castles and vineyards galore

We had an ulterior motive for the Rhine trip as we had been toying with the idea of taking the boat down the Rhine/Danube to the Black Sea and into the Med. After seeing the strength of the current and the volume/speed of barge traffic, we soon decided it’s not a trip for us. In an amazing coincidence though, we hadn’t been on the boat an hour when we saw a catamaran fighting the current coming the other way. It was Angel Louise, a U.S. boat, that had spent last winter at St. Kat’s with us! Ed and Sue successfully made it all the way from London to Istanbul where they are spending this winter. We heard they had to replace one of their engines along the way, so, fighting that Rhine current wasn’t without cost.

After A’s German assignment, while waiting for the next one, we were able to spend a week touring Brittany. We took the ferry to Calais and rented a car. In hindsight, it would have been better to take the ferry to St. Malo and start from there to save the long drive to Calais. Brittany is a unique region situated on the northwest corner of France. It has a unique culture with Celtic origins, more in line with Cornwall, rather than the rest of France. In Quimper, this was demonstrated with bagpipes being included in an open-air music concert.

We stayed in hotels and b&b’s and thoroughly enjoyed being land-based for a while. That didn’t stop us from visiting just about all the famous seaports around the coast. The coastline here has world-famous, often fog-bound, tidal races. It was nice to view them and the jagged, rock-strewn shoreline from the beach rather than from the sea.

Brittany street scene

Brittany stone house

Oldest calvary in Brittany

Reclining calvary figure

Manoir de Troezel Vraz, Kerbors, a really nice, quiet, rural, b&b, 17th century manor house with home-cooked food

Brittany shoreline

Dinan medieval street