Well, truth be told, this was a Brittany–Channel Islands–Normandy tour, the planning of which ended up being just as epic as it sounds. The biggest reason for this was the tour involved ferries, and one of those ferries (I’m looking at you here, Manche-Îles) abruptly changed their stated policy on transporting bikes *after* I had put the whole itinerary together and bought the tickets, which resulted in some scrambling. But if you can’t cope with a bit of scrambling, self-organized bike-touring is definitely not for you. And I’ve found over the years that I’ve done bike-touring that scrambles and detours often lead you to wonderful serendipitous discoveries. This tour was certainly no exception to that rule.
It started out smoothly enough in Paris with a lovely visit with friends in the Marais over glasses of “vin mystère” (you guess the region, appellation, and grape for a glass of either red or white wine they serve you–I was 0/3 on my guesses, naturally) at Le Barav and a nice gnocchi with orange-flower cream sauce at Le Joüy Bistrot. My sister’s flight the next morning was delayed, and the trains were running about half-speed due to strikes, but we still made our train to Saint-Malo with no problem and settled in at our hotel. We enjoyed watching the tide come rapidly in from our balcony for a few minutes (the tidal range all along La Manche is 14 ft!) before heading over into the “intra-muros” or old medieval city of Saint-Malo.
We ended up spending 3 nights total in Saint-Malo due to the ferry-generated changes in our itinerary, so we got to see a fair amount of the harbor and old city. I really enjoyed it. The old city is touristy, of course, but we weren’t there during peak season, so many streets still had a tranquil, almost sleepy seaside feel to them. We ate the best crêpes of our lives at La Touline: in Brittany they do buckwheat crêpes, which they call galettes or crêpes de blé noir, and they’re thin, crispy, nutty, and generally out of this world. We had savory ones with cheese for dinner and then sweet white-wheat crêpes for dessert with stewed apples and calvados. We also had a nice big salad and bolées or ceramic bowls of local cider (Brocéliande–fantastic if you can find it). Most of the shops were closed by the time we finished dinner, so we just strolled around doing a bit of window-shopping and headed back to the hotel to sleep off Cheryl’s jetlag and get ready for the ferry to Guernsey in the morning. Unfortunately, there was loud music downstairs in the bar until 2 am (I do not recommend the Hotel d’Aleth for this reason despite its charming balconies–also, the rooms are *tiny* and they have no space on the property to accommodate bicycles); however, she managed to sleep through the greater part of the night.
The Rookery 