Zumstegs on the Go

St. Malo sits right on the Atlantic coast, and has quite a history. Records indicate that St. Malo existed in the 1st century, and during the 1800s it became notorious as the home-base of pirates on the Atlantic. Disaster struck at the end of World War 2, as the city was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in August, 1944. Four years later (!), when funds became available to rebuild the city, it was decided to rebuild it not with modern buildings, but using the same stone materials as before to the architectural designs as before. In essence, the new St. Malo would be the old, beautiful St. Malo, but freshly built. The result is an exceedingly beautiful place.

St. Malo’s beauty brings a downside: the city is the most-visited place in Brittany. During July and August, it is, as an English friend of ours puts it, “heaving with people.” We visited for a day in mid-August, the highest point of tourism everywhere in France, and it was ugly.

Cars lined up to enter the city. This line was about half a mile long. Where they all planned to park I have no idea, as we’d just come from the city and it was already jammed.

As parking disappears, drivers get creative. These cars are parked on the grassy edge of a parking lot about half a mile from St. Malo. This was the last August holiday, so these drivers did not have to worry about getting a ticket or being towed away, as the ticket-writers and tow truck drivers were all taking the day off as well.

Oy!

Laurie has my permission to shoot me if I ever dress like this:

“Hey, I’m on vacation. I can wear whatever I want.”

But St. Malo has some beautiful sights, away from the crowds.

Creperies everywhere! St. Malo is the main city of Brittany, the origin of crepes. I can tell you that if I were looking for crepes in St. Malo, this would be the place: away from the crowds, in a lovely street.

What to say about St. Malo? I’d like to see it off-season, that’s for sure. I think it’s interesting that the city is comprised of what are essentially “new-old” buildings, and these buildings hold their own against modern architecture. They are beautiful, in a different way than a le Corbusier or a Frank Gehry building, but beautiful nevertheless.

Once in a while we encounter a new place that we immediately fall in love with, that we know is going to be a favorite. Dinan is one of those places. We were here three nights, could have stayed longer and know that we’ll be back.

Our Arrival

After a three hour drive from Saint-Pierre-Quiberon, we arrived in Dinan. Now, Dinan is an old city and our hotel was right in the middle of the City Historique, which means right in the middle of the old streets built for horses when horses were small, and it also means where the tourists are. But I had the hotel’s address in our trusty GPS and having become reasonably blasé about driving into places like this, charged into the city. We arrived at where the GPS located the hotel to find a.) we were, indeed, in the middle of a warren of small, mostly pedestrian, streets; and b.) there was no hotel in sight. Away we drove. We located a parking place, did some research, let the GPS find a new route and tried it again. The GPS promptly took us to a street with a big “Do Not Enter” sign on it and some words below, but as there were cars behind us, I didn’t take the time to figure out the words, so I turned away. We wandered around a bit and finally approached the hotel from the same street as we originally were on, but this time saw that the last short street was, indeed, the hotel’s street. This time we looked around more and, lo and behold, the hotel was right where we had stopped, both this time and on our first run through town. Now, I might mention that the hotel has a small sign above the second floor, which was not visible while we were in the car, so I have some excuse, but the GPS was right and I ignored it. Later, I realized that the “Do Not Enter” sign said, in small letters below it, “Except bikes, motorcycles and local service.” Well, as far as I was concerned, driving to the hotel was “local service” so I drove down that street every other time we returned to the hotel, often to the amazement and glaring looks of the pedestrians. Anyway, we arrived and checked in.

Now the fun started. Our room was large and comfortable, and its main attraction: this view out one of its three large windows:

View from our room, looking at the main pedestrian street of Dinan. We spent quite a bit of time sitting at the window, drinking wine or champagne and watching the activity. Another window looked out on another beautiful street.

The above picture was taken late in the day, when the tourist horde had subsided. Here’s a picture of the same street in mid-afternoon:

Even though Dinan had a lot of tourists, we enjoyed the activity. It wasn’t like Venice last year, where there were places a person could not even move because of the crowds, and here all the tourists are French – like La Rochelle: families of three generations walking together, couples, singles, folks just having fun.

Dinan was, like many larger medieval towns, a fortress town originally. Dinan has preserved almost all of its walls and they are amazing.

And to say that Dinan is beautiful understates the charm. One morning I walked out early to take pictures in the morning light (the morning tourist-less light, I might add). Here is early-morning Dinan:

The Port of Dinan, on the Rance river. We didn’t discover this until about 30 minutes before we had to leave, so we never walked down to it. Next time…

We love Dinan. The town and the area around it are beautiful. We took two day-trips, one to the Emerald Coast and one to St. Malo. More on them later. We are already looking forward to a return to Dinan.

We went to Sarlat, in the Dordogne region, after La Rochelle. Now, first off, the drive was…er…”interesting.” Because we wanted to stay off the autoroutes (highways) and drive on backroads, I put “Limoges” into the GPS, as going through Limoges would take us through some scenic areas. Unfortunately, I did not notice that the GPS has accepted “Limoges-Fourches” which is way the heck away from Limoges. I quickly realized the GPS was giving me incorrect directions, then realized that the GPS showed a distance of 500 km when I knew it should be about 200 km. So I got off the highway and figured that out, but to get back on the road in the right direction, GPS took me through a supermarket parking lot (which, in fact, was the best way to go), where a large truck was blocking the road until I decided to go around it and then it decided to move, so I was driving alongside it, on the wrong side of the road. Anyway, we got out of the parking lot and onto the right road.

Later we needed gas and because we were on back roads, there were not a lot of gas stations. Finally got to the town of Cognac where surely there would be gas stations, and lots to drink if there weren’t. First station: credit cards only and, despite the advertising that U.S. credit cards have chips, they don’t work in automatic gas pumps. So, off we go. Next station: closed. Finally found a supermarket station with a cashier, so – phew – we got gas.

On to Limoges… The GPS took us accurately through this good-sized city, right to the autoroute entrance we were to take, which was closed for construction. Oh-oh; GPSs do not know what to do in a situation like this. I started to back-track through Limoges, as I was sure I’d seen a sign pointing to another way to the autoroute. The GPS is now, of course, complaining that I need to go back to that closed entrance. I did, indeed, find that other route, took it to the autoroute and away we went. A disaster averted, as far as I’m concerned.

Scenic roads have one drawback: they have lots of traffic, much of it big trucks. Slow. Finally we got off onto some real back roads, saw some beautiful little towns and made our way to Sarlat.

Our hotel at Sarlat was nice, with an excellent restaurant. We asked the most gracious woman at the desk if she could put a bottle of our champagne in their refrigerator for us to drink the next night. When Laurie went to get it the next day, that lovely woman had it in a silver ice bucket, with two champagne glasses for us. We sat in their peaceful garden and had our champagne.

Our favorite champagne: blanc des blanc, in a beautiful garden.

How’s this for a nice place to have dinner? The food was superb, too.

Sarlat

Sarlat has a long history, but had fallen into bad shape until the 1960s. Then the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, found ways to get funds to French cities and towns to restore them and Sarlat was the first to get that funding. As a result, many buildings in the medieval core of the town have been restored. (Malraux himself is probably worth a post: a well-known novelist and philosopher, as Minister of Culture he pushed hard on getting France back on the world cultural stage. Among other things, he discovered an old, almost unknown law that required Paris buildings to have their facades cleaned once every ten years, and he enforced it. Paris went from being a dark and dirty city to having the beautiful buildings it has today.)

Sarlat’s restoration has had a down side: tourists by the thousands, all in a small area. Sarlat is the second-most visited small town in France, behind Mont Saint Michel. And like Mont Saint Michel, there just isn’t a large area for all those folks and so it gets crowded. But as in so many places, we found that if we walked a hundred yards from the tourist area, we found beautiful deserted backstreets.

Some pictures of Sarlat. These first were taken on a Sunday morning before the heaving crowds arrived.

Some backstreets…

Walking on these cobblestones is hard!

And…

Always the souvenirs…

Hmmmm, don’t know what to say about this…

We can agree with the comments about how interesting Sarlat is, but we can add something no guidebook mentioned: give it about two hours, unless you’re the type that likes to peruse shops of medieval souvenirs, walnut products (the area is famous for them), foie gras, postcards, wine, and other miscellanea…

We visited Chateau Les Milandes, the home of Joséphine Baker for many years, and loved the place for many reasons. But I don’t know how to talk about Joséphine Baker, because she seems to be largely unknown in the country of her birth, the United States. Here are a couple pictures of her from the mid-1920s in Paris.

Josephine Baker, (1906-1975) African American dancer, actress and entertainer, famous for her Paris stage shows and her scanty costumes (Photo by Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Here’s a few things about her:

• She was born in St. Louis, in 1906. To escape a childhood of grinding poverty, she started to dance in places around St. Louis, and in about 1923 went to New York to join the show “Shuffle Along.” She was hired as a costume handler, but soon was asked to join the chorus line and was an immediate hit.
• In 1925 she went to Paris to join a show called the “Revué Negré.” She took Paris by storm, and was soon the headliner in the show with her dancing.
• Over the next two decades she was the highest-paid performer in Europe. She was married several times, gaining French citizenship through one of the marriages.
• She was a constant battler against racism and prejudice. In 1935, at the height of her fame in Europe, she returned to do a show in New York and was shocked at her treatment: though she had a room at a top New York hotel, she was told to use the servants’ entrance, was refused service at the Stork Club, and had people spit on her.
• She bought a chateau – Les Milandes – in the Dordogne and with her husband Jo Bouillion adopted 12 children of mixed racial backgrounds and raised them there.
• During World War II she was a member of the French Resistance and given the Croix de Guerre by Charles de Gaulle for her efforts. Many Allied airmen were hidden in Les Milandes on their way to the border and freedom.
• After the war she “re-invented” herself as a singer. Though not equipped with a great voice, her style and charisma made her a hit with many songs.
• In 1969 she was broke (she may have been a great performer, but she was a terrible business person) and was evicted from Les Milandes. Her long-time friend Grace Kelly (then Princess Grace of Monaco) helped her find a place to live in Monaco. She returned to the stage as a singer and became popular all over again.
• Her battle for civil rights and against racism brought her back to the United States several times. In 1963 she gave the speech just before Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in the March on Washington

Josephine Baker seems largely unknown in the United States, though her memory is still revered here in France. In 2001 a wealthy family bought her chateau at Les Milandes and has restored it as a memorial to her. The chateau and its gardens are beautiful, but Josephine is the star: the rooms of the chateau display memorabilia of her, including many of the dresses in which she performed – including the famous “Banana Dress.”

We came here because I’d heard about Les Milandes years ago – before it was bought and restored to her memory – and having read about her, decided I wanted to see her home for so many years. It was totally enjoyable. Unfortunately, there was a sign forbidding picture-taking inside the chateau; fortunately the sign was in French and I couldn’t understand it.

One of Josephine’s performance dresses.

Laurie’s favorite of Josephine’s dresses.

A statue of Josephine in her Banana Dress (and nothing else – that was how she performed the Banana Dance).

Chateau Les Milandes

A view from Les Milandes. No wonder Josephine fell in love with the place.

One bathroom in the chateau. At the time it was created, Josephine’s favorite fragrance was by Christian Dior; this bathroom was done in black and gold, Dior’s colors.

The formal garden has been restored. An informal garden is in the process of restoration. The current owners are spending a lot on the place to bring it back to its glory.

There is a famous picture of an almost-destitute Josephine sitting on the kitchen-door steps the day she was evicted from Les Milandes. Here’s Laurie sitting in the same place as Josephine.

Josephine Baker fascinates us, and this visit to her home brought her to life for us. We urge you to read a bit about her, to learn about her courageous and often difficult life. She died in 1975 at the age of 69, the day after opening a new show in New York and receiving rave reviews from the hard-to-please New York critics. She is buried in Monaco.

La Rochelle has a little boat that goes between the old harbor and a big new marina called Les Minimes. It’s about a twenty minute ride each way and gives a beautiful look at the harbor from a different perspective, that of being on the water. On our previous trips here we kept saying we were going to do this little boat trip, but never seemed to make it; we were determined to do it this time. Here’s the boat:

Now, the sign at the boarding place of this boat ride says, clearly, that it runs every half hour from 8:30 in the morning until 11:30 at night. Great, so we arrived at the departure pier at 12:15 one day. No activity. Finally an employee came up the ramp and we learned that the next trip will leave at 1:30 – lunch time, we guess. There is no mention of this break in the schedule anywhere on the schedule sign.

Okay, so we went off and did something else and decided to return that evening. We walked back into town at about 6:30 that night and arrived at a place where we saw lots of boats sitting in the water, and this above us:

That is a diver standing on a platform that, we later learn, is 90 ft above the water. A couple seconds later:

As we stood there marvelling that any fool would do such a thing, it struck me that they were diving right into the passage that our little boat takes, which means…the boat will not  be running. Sure enough, no boat. (Turns out the event was the opening competition of the Red Bull Cliff Diving Championship; these guys do this in six or eight places around the world. Crazy!).

Fortunately, after dinner we got our boat ride, when the competition finished. And it was worth every bit of the wait: beautiful views of La Rochelle from the water. Total cost: 10 Euros. A funny story: as we sat on the boat for the first trip two women sat next to us and asked if we were two. “Yes,” we replied, and she said, “Oh, good. There are four of us now and we can go as a family and save a Euro each.” Sure enough, there’s a family fare of 2€ each if the “family” has four people (individual fare is 3€), and they are not at all rigorous about what constitutes a family. We had an excellent conversation with these two French ladies, and saved 2€. What a deal!

The Lantern – built in the 15th century for unknown reasons. Some say it was a lighthouse.

Our hotel, Les Brises, seen from the boat.

Coming into the La Rochelle harbor, a view seen by ships entering the harbor for hundreds of years.

A few unexpected turns, but well worth the effort.

More on La Rochelle…

When we arrived Tuesday afternoon, it was 98 here: a little hot, even for heat-loving me. The next morning changed: rain, lightning and thunder! C’mon, could we find a happy medium?

We went for a walk along the water, toward the west (the city is about a mile to the east of us, an easy walk along a beautifully done promenade). We’d never walked in this direction and found it beautiful and interesting with some history and a surprise ending thrown in.

First we came on a small marina. I think the boat owners in this marina have to plan  their outings with a tide table in hand.

We walked farther and found a route through a preserved area along a bluff above the water. We came upon this:

Looks old, and indeed it is. A sign nearby said it was built during the Siege of La Rochelle, to watch for English ships trying to supply the city. That was in 1624!

We continued walking along the path…

We met a few people, but it was pretty quiet, and beautiful, along the route. We came upon this, another structure build in 1624 for the Siege of La Rochelle.

On either side of this structure were more modern remnants of war: bunkers built by the Germans during World War II, also to watch the approaches to the city.

And the surprise ending: after walking a couple miles along the coast and seeing few people, we discovered a parking lot, returned to the trail and saw this:

Chez Mamie! Mussels and fries (a French national dish, it seems) with a glass of wine for $11.

We didn’t eat here, but the place made us laugh.  Only in France can you walk along a quiet waterfront path, find buildings built in the 1600s, and then come upon an outdoor café, jammed with people. We loved it!

More on La Rochelle tomorrow!

We’re back in our favorite city, La Rochelle. We love this place and find that we enjoy it more every time we’re here (this is our fourth visit). This time the weather is working to dissuade us, but it won’t work. In 2013 we came twice because our first visit, in late-June encountered cool and cloudy weather. Still we loved the place, not least because we got a room on the top floor of our hotel, overlooking the entrance to the La Rochelle harbor and we spent hours just watching the activity of boats in and out of the harbor. We came back in September, asked for the same room and encountered about the same weather, but our love of the city just increased. Last year we decided to come in late July, knowing that even though the city would be stuffed with French families on vacation, the weather would be better, and it was. So it was that we booked for mid-July again this year, again asking for “our”room. We arrived yesterday in 98 degree sunshine. Woke up this morning to rain, lightning, thunder and winds (our hotel is named les Brises and it lived up to its name today!). But what the heck, we still love it. Here’s some pictures.

Le P’tit Bleu

La Rochelle is on the Atlantic coast, and the old city is ranged around an ancient harbor, so it stands to reason that La Rochelle would have some good seafood restaurants. In fact, it has hundreds. One of our very favorites, though, may not qualify as a real restaurant. This is Le P’tit Bleu, which stands on the promenade along the old harbor.

Le P’tit Bleu. Maybe not a real restaurant as such, but the best grilled calamari ever, and fabulous mussels (moules).

Though I’m not a fan of food-photos, here’s the calamar grillé.

Here’s the view to the west from the eating area of Le P’tit Bleu, looking out the mouth of the La Rochell harbor. The two towers were build in the 14th and 15th centuries:

And to the east, looking at the restaurants ringing the old harbor.

Another good thing about Le P’tit Bleu: you can have six or seven glasses of wine with dinner, because they give you glasses that are more like slightly large thimbles.Here’s Laurie ready for her first glass:

The Harbor

We were worried last year about visiting here in July, as that is when French families come here – in droves – on vacation, and we usually aren’t too excited about being in a place full of tourists. But we found that it was great fun to be part of the tourist crowd, part of the families enjoying it here. Look at this picture taken along the waterfront: there are young couples, old couples, in-between couples, families, singles, everything, just enjoying a beautiful evening. I might also point out that this picture was taken at about 8:30 o’clock at night. Sunset here is about 9:50, which makes for beautiful evenings.

We went on a long, interesting walk today; I think I’ll save that for another post.