A tiny village from history

Mont St. Michel - INCREDIBLE!!!!

Another was the wine cave in Saumur -- Bouvet-Ladubay (if you see it in North America, please let me know!!)

Quick Tips:

Cheap wine in France is quite pricey at home.

On the roads, if your destination is not listed on the signs at a roundabout, take "Autres Directions" -- Other Directions -- it's the road to everything else!!

Best Way To Get Around:

Driving, walking, train, etc., depending on the distance and your time constraints.

Three storey stone vintage house. It is left over from the times of kings and queens.

We had originally thought several people would accompany us, so we ended up in this big 5 bedroom house. It actually was only 2 of us -- so a bathroom for each person was the case.

Each bedroom came with bed or beds, duvets on all.

Kitchen had good size fridge, gas range and oven and a washing machine. There was a clothesline outside.

Living room had 2 TVs (we couldn''t understand the channel lineups) and a VCR - we especially enjoyed the tape of the kindegarten spring play.

Great location, great price, would stay there again.

Price was actually 540 French francs for a single room with private bathroom including shower.

See Hotel Stella for current information.

This is not a luxury hotel -- it''s a 5 storey walk up with no assistance from the staff.

Rooms are sparse, and bathrooms do not have doors (in the singles). No 2 rooms are alike, so I can only comment on the 2 rooms we had -- mine was high ceilings, beams exposed - the other was low ceilings, no beams.

I was a bit creeped out by the bed -- I felt itchy from the moment I laid in it until I could fall asleep. I''m not sure about the cleanliness of the sheets.

Great location!!

The former royal home.

Read a tour book, because I will not do it justice.

We took a tour of the king's private apartment, which was good, and the chapel, which was beautiful. Even though you must pay extra to have a tour (English tours are available), it is well worth the extra $. Insight into furnishings and history is given. Since I'm not a student of world history, I found it added a lot to the visit.

Perched on a rocky islet in the midst of vast sandflats exposed to powerful tides between Normandy and Brittany is the "Wonder of the West", a Gothic-style Benedictine Abbey dedicated to the archangel Saint Michael, and the village that grew up in the shadow of its great walls. Built between the 11th and 16th centuries, the abbey is an extraordinary technical and artistic tour de force, having to adapt to the problems posed by this unique natural site.

If you don't know what Dieppe is or what happened there, you are not Canadian.

As you walk around Dieppe you will find many monuments and reminders of the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942, when more than a thousand Allied troops, most of them young Canadians, were killed in an assault on heavily defended German positions. It is an episode that many believe served little purpose at great human cost in the war to end the Nazi oppression of Europe. The anniversary of the raid is commemorated each year - both in Dieppe and in Newhaven, the port from which many of the ill-fated Allied soldiers embarked.

If you are Canadian, you will be very touched by the memorials. Having had an uncle fight at Dieppe, I became quite weepy.
I expect it is the same feeling as those who have connections to the D-day invasions on Utah and Omaha Beaches.

Wow -- that's all that needs to said about the view from the top at night.

Go, go as quick as you can after the sun goes down.

It's windy outside and your photos won't come out unless you have an awesome expensive camera, but you'll have the memories and the opportunity to meet people from all over the world in the City of Lights.

P.S. And take the elevator!!!

Impressionists are my favorite and this museum is chock full of impressionist art.

We started out in the museum shop - which rocks!! Lots of prints, books, etc. that will help you remember your time here.

Manet, Monet, Cezanne abound - it's your chance to see the original works of art you have only seen in books.

Go, go, go!!!

The name means "Fly Boats". Well, they don't fly down the Seine, but they may be named that because they're as annoying as flies. I just don't know.

You and 200 of your closest fellow tourists squish onto a sightseeing boat that takes you up and down the Seine

From the boat, see Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, Le Louvre, and the Musee D'Orsay --the sights never stop and you get to hear about them in 5 languages on a loop tape that is timed exactly to keep you up to date on what is on your right side.

If you don't have enough time to see it all on land, this will help you see it all. It's one hour & 10 minutes of tourism packed in as tight as sardines. And a welcome break from the walking you will do in Paris.

FRANCE

Saturday, March 21, 1998
Arrive in Paris, but we don’t believe it. Our entire time in Paris is spent underground on the subway and train system. We get a TGV (very fast speed) train to Rennes, transfer to another train to Dol de Bretagne. We spend a lovely 3 hours in Dol, a village the size of Salisbury, NB. There is a local cycling race that speeds by us several times as we sit in the Horse Race Betting Bar sipping our beer waiting for our final train to take us to Dinan. We arrived in Dinan at 6pm, local time – about 24 hours after leaving Halifax. We got to the house we were renting and basically collapsed.

Sunday, March 22, 1998
Spent the day tooling around Dinan. Of course, since it was Sunday, most shops were closed, but we did find some fruits & veggies & bread at a corner store. We took in some sights Dinan has to offer – a couple of churches, an English Garden, the clock tower, and all the quaint little cobblestone streets.

Monday, March 23, 1998
Again, spent the day in Dinan – found a real grocery store. Did you know that you can’t buy plain tortilla chips and salsa here? Cannibals!!! Saw a few more sights, including outside the walled city. Many NICE homes. The gardens are in bloom and the trees have leaves on them already.

Tuesday, March 24, 1998
Up to catch a 6am train to Paris!! We make this Versailles day, and eat lunch at McDonald’s (we will soon find out that McD’s is the one place we can count on in this country). We spend most of the afternoon in Versailles, take the King’s apartment tour. We misunderstand the tour guide (speaking very odd English) as explaining that there is a painting of the Holocaust on the ceiling of the chapel – really it is the Holy Ghost (Father, Son, and Holocaust)! Phew!! We head back to Paris and go Diana gawking – the Pont d’Alma. Then we truck back to the train station and head back to Dinan, where we arrive at 11pm. Yawn!!

Wednesday, March 25, 1998
Off to St. Malo to pick up the rental car. We ignore the town and head directly to Mont St. Michel. This is an absolutely incredible sight. It used to be a large rock off the coast. At high tide, it was cut off from the mainland due to the tides rushing in – as quickly as the Bay of Fundy tides. They built an abbey on this rock and the community grew around it in a corkscrew fashion. The only part of the Mont that is resting on the original rock is the abbey (where the monks and nuns hang out). The rest of the island is supported by columns. Very impressive sight. After climbing this place, you’ll never complain about St. Joseph’s Oratory’s steps again!!

Thursday, March 26, 1998
We decide to head off to Dieppe, through Normandy, today. It is very wet, to say the least. It takes turns raining cats and then raining dogs. We occasionally run into the odd raining horse!!! But, off to Dieppe we go. It’s not as amazing as I expected – just a beach with very high cliffs (like at my parents’ cottage x 2-3 times as high). There are a few war memorials mentioning Canada, and if you mention you are from Canada they treat you with great respect (throughout the country). About 5km away from Dieppe is Pourville, a beach community that Monet painted a series in. I have a print of this area, so it was quite neat seeing the location from the same perspective as my favorite painter. Then we headed back home – this time on the pay highway, which is worth it. Dieppe is a 5 hour trip from Dinan (don’t reccommend making it a 1 day return trip – definitely overnight!!). This is the day that we realize McDonald’s will be our beacon away from home. We are unable to completely understand the road signs. Often there are signs directing you to various cities and then a generic "Autres directions." It takes us a while to understand that we should go with Other Directions when we are unsure. However, it takes us a few days on the road before it sinks in. Another favorite "Toutes Directions," the road to everywhere!! McD’s serves excellent coffee for a reasonable price ($1.50+/-), has clean bathrooms, and staff that is willing to help those who attempt to speak French. This is not always the case – staff at garages (i.e. gas station) basically spit at us when Heather mispronounces "Rouen." The comment we keep to ourselves is – OK, say "HEATHER"!!!

Friday, March 27, 1998
After yesterday, we are ready for a local day. The highlight of the day would be my driving lesson. Since we rented a standard transmission car, Heather has been doing the driving to this point. Now it’s my turn to take the wheel. We start off on a back road near Dinan. I enjoy standard driving intensely – I thrive on it. I would rather have ants eat my flesh than ever purchase one of my own. Ramsay can probably comment on this, as he was the lucky one to give me my first standard lesson. By the end of the day, I do drive in town and pull into a supermarket parking lot. Heather runs in to buy her $2 wine (which would be $10-15 wine at home), while I try to collect myself from the nerve-wracking day of driving.

Saturday, March 28, 1998
We take a little trip up the Emerald Coast of Brittany. It’s absolutely quaint. Many little coastal villages. We also found Fort la Latte, which is frequently used as a film set. There was a movie being filmed while we were there. I see a windmill – excited!!

Sunday, March 29, 1998
Off to the Loire Valley. We go on a tour of a wine cave, which is very neat – we see the whole process and then get free wine later. We both bought bottles of this wine – in Canadian $ it cost us $7.50 a bottle – in Canada we would pay $40-50 a bottle. Then we moved on to the Mushroom Museum. This was the absolute worst thing I have ever dealt with. There was supposed to be a tour, but it turns out that the English Tour consists of a $7 book that you read as you go through the museum, which you already paid $10 to get into. Stay away from the Mushroom Museum. I drive home and end up taking a detour through Nantes, the town Bluebeard lived in. At a traffic circle, the car stalls (because I don’t drive a standard well) and I am ready to leave the car where it is, get out, and go away crying – thank god Heather is used to teaching people how to fly planes – she talked me through it and we were on our way, once again.

Monday, March 30, 1998
We are ready for another local day, so we walk around town. Today, we visit the castle across the street from us. We are in the centre of town when the Clock Tower chimes 3 o’clock. We look at our watches and find that we only have 2:00. We (think) ask the girls at the Tourist Bureau if the clocks turned forward this past weekend – they give us a weird look and say no. It is not until 3 hours later that I realize that I have confused the word clock (horloge) with bell (cloche) – I asked them if the bells turned forward!! And I wonder why we received a weird look. After all the confusion, the clocks did go ahead on Saturday night – we have been working on the wrong clock for close to 48 hours!!

Tuesday, March 31, 1998
We head back to the Loire Valley. This time we are on a chateau-a-thon. Our first stop is at Montgeoffrey. It was protected during the French Revolution and many of the furnishings are original 18th century. We have a personal tour guide take us through the house, where the family still lives today, the chapel, and the stables. She explains that they no longer keep horses, but they do have sheep. She also attempts to explain that they have another animal – they live in the forest, we have them in Canada, it’s like a donkey, ooo, ooo, Bumbi!! Ah, yes, Bumbi – the forest dwelling donkey, a.k.a. DEER!! Montgeoffrey will go down in history as Bumbi’s house. The second chateau we went into was Usse – the castle that inspired Sleeping Beauty. I found it quite tacky, with mannequins dressed up in wedding dresses and Sleeping Beauty/Wicked Witch attire. Also, the tour was very rushed.

Wednesday, April 1, 1998
We return the car to St. Malo, and drive through Dinard on the way home. Dinard is a big thallasotherapy area – they put mud and stuff on you, sort of like a spa – and is home to a lot of people with just too much money. St. Malo is a pirate area – I guess they lived out of St. Malo when they were on dry land – and has lots of connections to the beaudoins, who are attached to the Quebecois. It’s a nice place, but if you’ve seen one walled city, you’ve seen ‘em all. And I’m getting really tired of the cobblestones now. My feet hurt and I just want to go back home now.

Thursday, April 2, 1998
Do the last minute stuff in Dinan – pick up souvenirs, do a laundry, and start to pack.

Friday, April 3, 1998
Head off to Paris. We will be staying 2 nights at Hotel Stella (STELLA!!!), a 5-storey walk-up hotel in the Latin Quarter. Great location, but no heat (and it is still chilly at night), and no help dragging luggage up and down the stairs. We go to the Louvre where we see the Mona Lisa (disappointing), another dead king’s apartment, and the Code of Hamarubi – anyone who took Grade 12 Law from Mr. Wallace at HTHS will remember that this is the 1st ever written law (King of Babylon engraved a stone tablet with the laws he wanted his citizens to follow, stuck it in the middle of town, and let them read the laws). We have dinner in a Greek restaurant, that beats the hell out of Dmitri’s in Fredericton. Then we’re off to the Eiffel Tower, after dark. Paris truly is the City of Lights.

Saturday, April 4
We go to the Musee D’Orsay, which has a special Monet exhibit. This was the highlight of the trip for me – Monet everywhere – prints I had seen forever and now I get to see the real thing. After the museum, we take a Bateaux Mouches tour up and down the Seine, where they point out all the sights that we were too tired to see, or didn’t have enough time to see. We then head to the area near the Louvre that resembles Times Square in NYC (the part that has all the tacky tourist shops – cheap t-shirts, souvenir Eiffel Towers, and the like) to pick up the required items for those nephews at home. The last thing we did in Paris was spend 3 hours in a restaurant. We started off ordering our food and then began talking with the couple next to us. They asked us about our part of Canada and how we liked France. They told us about places we should have gone to, so they’re on a list now, in case I ever go back.

Sunday, April 5
Go to the airport so that I can be loaded onto a plane to wait 3 hours to take off (between queue delays, fuel miscalculations, and fainting passengers). Finally we make it back to Halifax at 6pm. Very happy to be back on Canadian soil.

I had seen the Monet painting "Cliffwalk at Pourville" and felt a pull to my childhood. No, I had not been in France before, I had not been to Pourville, I am not French. But the view of small boats in the ocean off a grassy cliff spoke of my parents' cottage location. How often had I played in the grass near the cliff edge? How many boats passed while I played?

So I had to see the location -- well, it's only 5 kilometres from Dieppe, and I was there, so off we go to Pourville.

It ends up that it's a little resort town -- used to be a booming place in the summer (like the Adirondacks in NY) and has calmed down quite a bit as air travel has allowed people to travel farther in a shorter time.

Really, I just wanted to stand on the cliff that Monet stood on to paint "Cliff Walk...."

We visit Bouvet-Ladubay wine caves in the Loire Valley. I am not a wine drinker but the tasting after the tour changes my mind -- I am in love with a wine I will never be able to afford at home.

The tour is good, bilingual (there is a French family touring with us), and informative. The guide's English abilities are very advanced!!

After the tour, being quite tipsy from the tasting, we head to the local Mushroom Museum. This is a rip off. There are no English tours, even though promotional material and guide books tell us there is. They sell us a $8 mushroom book in English and off we go underground to look at mushrooms grow. There are pretty mushrooms, colorful mushrooms, and oddly shaped mushrooms. Mushrooms, mushrooms, everywhere.

The museum also has a small restaurnt attached which will serve you mushrooms in a variety of states. Fried, fricaseed, boiled, shredded, etc. -- you want your mushrooms done a certain way, this is the place to go!!!

Dinan is located in the Cotes D’Armour region only a 20 minute drive from "The Corsair City" of Saint-Malo, a Ferry Port which has frequent crossings to and from the South Coast of England and the Channel Islands.

Dinan is one of the finest of all Brittany's "Towns of Artistic and Architectural Interest" (Ville d'Art et d'Histoire) and it has lost none of its medieval charm. If there are such things as magical towns where history is omnipresent, then Dinan surely merits to be counted among the number. It is one of Europe’s most exceptional towns. Former seat of the dukes of Brittany, Dinan is protected by 75 metre high Ramparts, dominating the Rance river.

It is a good place to stay either for a while to enjoy discovering the surrounding area or just overnight to break your journey to and from Central France.

Within the town are chateau, gardens, lively narrow, cobbled, flower-decked streets and half-timbered buildings. Take a walk in Dinan's parks and gardens with their unique views over the Rance Valley. You can visit the medieval belfry called "La Tour de l'Horloge", "Saint Sauveur" basilica (XIIth Century), "Saint Malo" church (XVth - XIXth) and the many places of interest within just a short drive away.

A Little History

The first existing record of a lord of Dinan dates back to the 10th century. A document relates that Josselin, the brother of the Archbishop of Dol was present when Anne of Brittany gave the Abbey of Saint George to the Archbishop. Dinan became a true city at this time. A Benedictine convent moved in, and in the beginning of the 12th century, a system of defense was begun.

By the beginning of the 14th century, Dinan was prospering thanks to its commerce with England and Flanders. Unfortunately, the War of Secession of Brittany put an end to Dinan's economic prosperity. Dinan took the side of Charles de Blois, and when he was killed, Jean IV, Duke of Monfort, laid siege to the city for a month. He celebrated his victory with the construction of a dungeon (1380-1387).

During this troubled period, the English besieged the city incessantly. Du Guesclin, commander of the resistance for Dinan, fought and defeated Thomas of Canterbury at today's Place du Champs Clos.

In the 15th century, Dinan reinforced its ramparts and added several towers more adapted to the progress of artillery at the time. In 1598, during the League, Dinan united the Duke of Mercoeur the rebel, and rallied against Henri IV.

Throughout the 17th century, religious orders set up convents in the Dinan area. In the 18th century, religion became less important, and the sound of 800 spinning wheels filled the city, weaving cloths that were exported to the West Indies and to South America. The city's fairs attracted huge crowds.

Urbanisation evolved for these and other reasons, thanks to the influence of Charles Déclassé-Pinot.

Originally (Kith), Dinan is a small commercial harbour on the Rance. The strategical and economical importance of this port didn't escape the attention of the Breton Dukes. One of them, Jean Le Roux 1st, buys the kingdom of Dinan from its feudal lords and poses the first stones of an imposing fortress. It still shelters medieval churches, convents, wooden lathed houses and private mansions... The exceptional riches of this architectural, military, civil, religious and contemporary heritage are marvellously maintained in Dinan, a city of human dimension with a real quality of life. A journey into a faraway past, rich in history and glory, an invitation to discovery and dream!

In Dinan, the decor is reality

2,700 metres of ramparts (XIIIth - XVth), a Roman-Gothic basilica, a beautiful gothic church, an imposing XIVth century keep. An architectural heritage marvellously preserved. About fifty wooden lathed houses, renaissance hotels, a medieval belfry "La Tour de l'Horloge", convents, about one hundred or so private mansions from the "Lumières" era, a very ancient port on the Rance, a deep valley, a natural preserved setting.