A driving day, the longest so far, 625km it was a long drive. We said farewell to Ann and her gite, she did her inspection and returned our €150 deposit, it is not usual to pay a deposit but what do you do. All in all though we were very comfortable and it was a nice spot and the lack of wee fee as the French call it was my fault as it was never in the specs, still the Cafe De La Paix served us well. We also said goodbye to Tibbles the cat who adopted us, turns out her name was Moon and she lived next door but as cats go she was ok.
Most of the journey was on the motorway system but amazingly only one toll. It was at a point around 300km to go that Penny volunteered to drive, this was a first for her, driving a left hand drive car and in France. She was a natural and I was so relaxed I was asleep for nearly 200 kms. We stopped for a picnic and there was only a trip from Tweed Heads to Brisbane to go. The weather when we started was poor and raining but by the time we drove into St Juan Des Guerets just outside St Malo we were in brilliant sunshine.
After finding the gite and checking in we set off for St Malo and some dinner. In the tradition of the Bates finding festivals and events turns out two replica ships from the 18th century arrived in port that day with others to arrive in the next few days. The "Etoile du Roy" was built in 1996 for the Hornblower series on ITV to represent a British sixth rate frigate. The other is the "Hermonie" the ship that Lafayette, the French guy who fought in the American War of Independence, sailed to America in. Both ships will be open to the public but not sure if we will have the time to board. In the town itself there were people walking around in period costume including Lafayette himself, as we were walking through one of the town gates we thought we heard bagpipes and indeed we did it was Brittany folk dancing ( no not Spears) with bagpipes and drums.
Time for dinner and I had a yearning to try mouile and frites since we first went to Brugge in 2010. I decided tonight was the time and ordered them. I was a bit apprehensive as I thought they might be a bit fishy in taste, I'm not a big seafood eater so imagine my surprise that they were very nice in a white wine sauce, the only one thing was there were specks of sand in the sauce at the bottom which gave them a bit of a crunch.
This was a day of firsts......
