Home » France » Paris - Loire - Bretagne by bicycle

Total distance: 1700 km (1060 mi)

Paris - Loire - Bretagne by bicycle

Thomas Driemeyer
2005-10-13 21:35:53

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constantly climbing or rolling down small hills, but they were small enough to not slow us down significantly.

All over the Bretagne one can find menhirs, large conic stones erected upright all over the northwestern end of the Bretagne, often topping 5 meters or more. They have entire menhir fields there with hundreds of menhirs. I am told they date back to neolithic times, about 5000 BC, and the later druids were just squatting. Still, Asterix merchandising is the big thing there.

Our next stop was St. Brieuc, not because it is particularly interesting but because my favorite aunt lives in a small village nearby. We spent several days there and used it as our base for excursions to le Mont-St. Michel and St. Malo. Mont-St. Michel, 7.4k

Mont-St. Michel is not in the Bretagne, it's just on the other side of the border in the Normandie. They have a nice youth hostel in St. Michel, parts of which were still under construction in 1993. The main attraction is a cloister on an island in the bay. The island has been totally converted to a cloister by the monks, complete with a large cathedral and many outbuildings, and high walls. Seen from the outside, the island is shaped like a cone, with the cathedral built on the highest point of a natural hill.

When we got there, it was foggy, which added to the sinister medieval Name-of-the-Rose atmosphere (if you haven't seen this movie, by all means do so). We were also very early, before the tourists flooded the island. They have a parking lot for tourist busses right in front of the outer walls, and converted a (thankfully short) stretch of road inside to a tourist trap where one can buy postcards or trashy paintings of Mont-St. Michel with the sun rising in the background. It doesn't really look like on the paintings because the sea level is falling there and the island looks more like a beached whale at times. The rest of the buildings is largely in their original state though. It's definitely worth a visit.

The last excursion went from St. Brieuc to St. Malo, which is a pleasant district capital that adjusted to the demands on a modern city by closing off most of the old downtown, still mostly ringed by its walls and cannons pointing out to the sea. Not that there are no cars there, we are in France after all, but it's easy to get around as a pedestrian. The modern part of St. Malo is outside of this downtown area.

We didn't ride back from St. Brieuc to Paris, we took the high-speed TGV train. I shipped the bicycle directly back to Berlin, which normally takes a few days (always more than claimed). The train isn't doing high speed all the time and was rather cramped, but it is an excellent way of travelling, and certainly beats air transport, which is extremely expensive in Europe anyway.