France 2023 - Où est le pâté de porc?

North into Normandy 🧭 Coming to the end of the holiday now. Just a few more days left to see a couple of things then its Eurotunnel and home. Today was a day of change. We knew it would be a motorway day doing at least 200miles heading North but where too 🤔?      Over breakfast maps were studied and options considered. There was a national park we hadn't been in which was, sort of en route, Le Parc naturel regional et Geoparc Normandie Maine.  👱‍♀️"We could go up into that, stay one night then cut across it, stay one night then go up towards Paris and go to Charles Monet's house , look at all the famous paintings and wander round the gardens. That would still give us a day or two left to do something else". 👨"I've a mate who's over for a short break, he's up at Honfleur on the Normandy coast, wouldn't mind catching up with him". 👱‍♀️"Hmm, that's a bit far to get too in one day, we would be jumping across from one side to the

The GGR ⛵ - Golden Globe Race. What is it? Its the race that Jill followed, religiously, for over 200 days 😯.  Everyday she was tracking entrants progress, checking weather reports, internet and Facebook live feeds, who was having problems, who had dropped out, what was going on etc. The 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe race was the first ever around-the-world yacht race. It was an adventure to determine who could be the first to circumnavigate the globe solo, nonstop without assistance. Nine sailors started, only one finished; Robin Knox Johnston. It took him 312 days. There was a scale model of his boat Suhaili, on the quay.     Today, very little has changed from that original race and it is very simple : 16 sailors from around the world, aged between 27 and 68 departed from Les Sables-d’Olonne, France on September 4th 2022 to sail solo, non-stop around the world with no outside assistance. They would cover approximately 30,000 miles each to return to Les Sabl

Motorway day 🛣️ We have a big punch day today, south east  along the coast as we have somewhere we need to be the next day and it will be 4 years before we get the chance again to see what we want to see. 😯 Its mostly motorway but there are one or two things to look at along the way.. 1st : A 5mile tailback Five miles of stationary or snails pace traffic thanks to Jills friends..."I dont believe it, ###### grass cutters" 😡 2nd : The Saint Nazaire Bridge . Built in 1975, its the longest bridge in France, a fraction over 2 miles long. It has 3 traffic lanes,  a cycle lane and a pedestrian lane ... you can walk over it 😱 (but not in high wind). In the centre the lanes are 200 feet above the water. 3rd : The Breton Marsh The Breton marsh extends over 139 square miles and is made up of strips of land and wet meadows separated by canals, hundreds of them ! Its now protected from the sea by dykes, rows of pine trees a

We need to do this and this and this and... For almost all of  this trip we have been flexible and mostly making it up as we go along or day by day. We really only have/had 3 dates we had to be somewhere. Getting the Eurotunnel to France, getting the Eurotunnel home and being somewhere on the 24th of June. We had things to cram in now before the 24th.      "Today we need to go and see this lighthouse, then we need to go and see this lighthouse, then we need fuel, then we need  to go shopping because I've only got one breakfast yoghurt left and you only have two bottles of beer in the fridge so if we don't go shopping we are going to staaaaaarve 😩, oh and we need to get to the next stop over place early before it fills up......😟"."Okey dokey, lets go!"      Back into Morlaix we went but this time Jill managed to throw the van into the very tight uphill bend so we didn't have to go back and forth to roundabouts then it was across country to the sea.