Dinan, July 13

Thursday, July 13
Dinan, France

We boarded another private bus this morning for a 2½ hour transfer to the medieval village of Dinan, a walled city perched high atop a hill on the edge of the Brittany region of France. More... Here we met a local guide named Marie-Élaine, who gave us a short tour through its cobblestoned streets.

Dinan was an ancient export and fishing port town, connected to the sea 15 miles away by the River Rance. The town grew by taxing river traffic, but because its location was so exposed, the townspeople retreated to the hillside behind ramparts. A large section of the city walls remains, part of which can still be View of river from Dinan walked upon. The town escaped the bombs of WWII, so its Gothic church and half-timbered buildings, many of them dating back to the 13th century, are still wonderfully preserved.

The buildings date from the time when property taxes were based on the square footage of your ground floor. To protect themselves from rain (and taxes), the townspeople would start their buildings with small ground floors, then expanded outward into upper floors, with roofs that nearly touched their neighbors. In medieval times, vendors would sell their wares in front of their homes while sitting underneath their leaning walls.

Although the people here mostly speak standard French, the traditional language of the Brittany region is Breton, which is closely related to Cornish and more distantly to Welsh. Along with Cornwall and Wales in England, where the original settlers emigrated from, Bretons are considered Celtic Britons. As late as the mid-20th century, the Breton language was banned from French schools, Celtic music was forbidden, and people could lose their French citizenship if they had a Celtic name. Since 1951, however, Breton speakers have been allowed to speak their language and celebrate their culture openly. The music stores in Dinan today sell mostly Celtic music, and they even have their own Breton TV and radio stations.

It was market day here, too, so after our tour we grabbed a quick lunch from one of the food stalls (sausages wrapped in buckwheat crêpes – saucisse et galettes -- and a bottle of cider).

I also used a public washroom here where you were supposed to collect your toilet paper from a dispenser on the wall before you go into the stall to do your business. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice that until it was too late, so I was forced to do what a billion civilized people on this planet still do – use my left hand. Luckily, there was a sink to rinse off with and hand sanitizer back in the van. From now on, I’ll make sure I carry my tissues with me!

Then we were reunited with our bikes at the port and began our 26.5-mile ride (15 miles for me). We started off on a nice footpath along the River Rance, but we soon encountered lots of rolling hills.

After some time to have drinks and view the granite houses draped with fishing nets in the estuary town of St. Suliac, I rode the rest of the way to our destination in the van with Adel. I was joined this time by two other girls from our group, Jennifer and Sanna, because they didn’t want to tackle the hills either. (Sanna is the mother of the two young men in our group. She was originally from Lebanon, which used to be under French control after World War I, so she speaks fluent French. She’s acted as our unofficial translator on this trip.)

Gary and Karen on the River Rance in St. Suliac, Brittany

Our new destination on this trip is the beautiful medieval fortified city of Saint-Malo on Brittany’s coast across from the English Channel. Saint-Malo was the legendary home of French corsairs (privateers -- private persons who held a letter of marque from the government allowing them to conduct piracy at sea during wartime). It’s also the main setting of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “All The Light We Cannot See” by American author Anthony Doerr.

Our hotel in Saint-Malo, The Grand Hotel des Thermes (the Grand Spa Hotel) is a modern resort hotel with thermal spas and massage treatments. While it’s by the far the nicest hotel we’ve stayed in on this trip with fantastic views of the sea, it’s also very confusing to find your way around here because it has two separate wings which require two different elevators. Gary actually got lost once!

Gary and I went for a long walk on the pedestrian promenade and stopped in at several bars for drinks. Then we had dinner at La Brasserie du Sillon, a seafood restaurant at the end of the promenade where our tour leaders had made reservations for us. The menu was entirely in French, but my limited knowledge of French vocabulary was enough for us to pick out what we wanted.