Holidays...part 11

Tuesday

Locronan

Hurray we woke up to blue skies.  Fantastic, but first things first, we needed to do some laundry – so I went to fathom out the French washing machines whilst Tom and Matt went for a play in the pool.  I strolled over to watch them once I got the machines working.  Being just 10am, the pool was quite empty so they had the run of it and were up and down the waterslides like yo-yos. 

I thought I would try out my speed function on my camera and took some pics of them coming down the slide.  Unfortunately they made a huge splash and covered me and the camera in water.  It took the rest of the day in the hot car to dry the camera out!  Oops.  Hopefully, I have some good shots as a result.

Galette time

It was noon by the time the washing was hung out to dry, so we packed up quickly and headed West.  Today’s plan to visit Locronan, a unspoilt and therefore quite touristy village and then head to ‘The End of the World’ – well the end of Western France anyway: Point du Raz.  As you can see from the place names here, there is very little French influence.  It is just like being in Wales – all the place names and road signs are in French and Breton.  There are lots of places starting with PL (our favourite being Plogoff) and Ty, nothing sounds French.  In fact there is one area called Cornouaille – humm, I wonder where that comes from.  They are fiercely proud of their Celtic heritage, the Breton flag is everywhere.

We found Locronan – a small hill top village.  It really was unspoilt, a very lovely place to wander around.  First stop though was somewhere to eat.  We thought we would get ripped off here as every establishment was very obviously set up for the day tripper tourist.  We were therefore very pleasantly surprised to find that a crepe or galette  was pretty much the same price here as anywhere else we have been.  We found ourselves a table in a garden: I had one with everything (ham, cheese, egg, mushrooms and tomatoes) whilst Matt had one with a huge Toulouse sausage on it and Tom had a crepe with apple compote which he was very pleased with. 

At the end of the world

We then explored the village, finding some very interesting shops – one with some amazing handmade coats in it, which started at €400 – we looked and didn’t touch!  We found another shop which looked quite small to start with, but then opened out to a huge food and drink emporium.  There were 128 Breton beers to start with as well as huge amounts of biscuits, meat, tinned fish etc etc.  We couldn’t quite believe our eyes: made notes and then went to explore the rest of the village.  It was very quaint, cobbled streets, narrow allies, big church, all very French.

Looking for Canada

Guess what we did next – yep, we went back to that shop and bought beer, cider and biscuits.  We returned to the car around 2.45 – a little later than we expected as we liked Locronan more than we were expecting.  We then headed west, west, west as far as the road went to Pointe du Raz.  This is the ‘Land’s End’ of France, much nicer than the one in the UK (I haven’t been but have only heard bad reports from it).  We were given a map of the area on arrival and planned a walk around the headland to take in the jagged coast and lighthouses.  It was a very pleasant walk, under deep blue skies with very little wind.  We were greeted by an outcrop of granite and a square lighthouse at end, all looking very picturesque in the very calm Atlantic.  We continued on with our loop, walking through heather moorland back to the visitor’s centre.  It really was a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon.

We got back around 5.30 and decided that as the restaurants looked decent enough we would stop and have tea there.  We found a restaurant that did a 12€50 menu: prawns for starter, moules or fish for mains and crepe for dessert.  Perfect. We had two of those and an extra plate.  AND for the first time this holiday, we had to do it all in French, as the waitress didn’t / refused to speak English.  Fantastic.  She was lovely too – she liked Tom (he was the only child around) and we even managed to chat about his crocodile hat – she asked about it, I managed to say it came from Australia (all basic stuff, but when you were a dunce at French, it is very lovely to see that someone can understand you!).  Both Matt and I lost a couple of prawns, I then lost a lot of my moules but Tom was very very happy. 

Eating prawns

We then headed home through lots of little villages on the peninsula.  Tom was sleepy but we manage to keep him awake playing animal fact cards.   We got home, had showers, a quick game of Top Trumps (I lost again!) before Tom went to bed.  He was very sleepy but is having trouble getting to sleep – he’s just developed a horrible dry cough (not good, that’s what he had in Shropshire) so we are keeping an eye on him and have the inhaler ready if needed.