Our Blog - Bretagne Trip - Summer 2021 Part 1

There was an ongoing "joke" when I was working that Europe took the month of August off and went on vacation. It isn't that far from the truth, in fact. The European Union mandates that all member states provide all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation. In France, the law is 5 weeks (30 days including Saturdays but not counting Sundays). You also can get "bonus" days if you decide to take your vacation outside of the summer as well as additional days for people who work more than 35 hours per week. If you really want to maximize all of the rules, you may be able to get 9 1/2 weeks of paid vacation time per year (5 weeks of vacation + 4 weeks of the bonus days for working over 35 hours per week plus 1/2 a week for working through the summer). If you happen to come to France during July and August and are traveling somewhere other than Paris tourist zones, you'll probably spot a lot of closed shops and restaurants. Strange, you think, considering it's tourist season. But this is when the majority of the French take their vacations as well (except those people who work in the tourist industries or are maximizing their vacation days by working the summer).

The majority of French head to a coast. The French Riviera around the Mediterranean is a popular spot, with the French loving to lounge around the white sand beaches. There is also the southern part of the Atlantic coast that also has lots of white sand beaches. Brittany, on the other had, has a mostly rocky coastline, but it is beautiful and less busy. It is also the one place in France that normally is not hot during the summer! While we have air conditioning in our apartment, Toulouse normally gets pretty hot during August and walking around the concrete sidewalks gets a bit toasty. So we decided to "be like the French" and we headed to Brittany for the month of August!

One thing that we never thought of in France is camping (no, we didn't go camping) ... but camping is one way to spend your holiday if you're French. The country has more campsites than nearly anywhere else in the world and during the summer months, everywhere from municipal sites to five-star camping resorts are packed. We are always shocked at how many RVs are setup in little camping areas all along the Brittany coast. And it isn't like the campsites when I was young ... these have indoor pools, playgrounds, and restaurants.

This month-long vacation has two purposes: first is to get out of the heat of Toulouse during the month of August, but also to be able to see places in Brittany, especially the North-Western part. That part of Brittany is somewhat isolated and it is a long way away from everywhere else. As a point of reference, the department name is "Finistère", which comes from the Latin Finis Terræ, meaning "end of the earth". And as you can imagine, we did a LOT of things in our 4-week vacation! Some of my blog entries will be towns and others will just be random things that we did during the day. We tried to do some kind of a 2-hour walk every day for Lucy in addition to seeing various towns and villages. We also found several beaches for Lucy to run and play on, some better than others. We are spending an entire month here and we didn't feel like eating out 3 meals a day for the entire time. We decided to try to eat similar to how we do at home, which is dinner out twice a week, and breakfast/lunches in or out depending on what we have planned. Both of the gîtes that we rented had a small kitchen (stove, oven, fridge, microwave, toaster, coffee maker) so cooking isn't that much of a problem.

I decided I wanted to look up a few things that we had thought about while we were in Brittany, specifically with the Breton language. There are LOTS of towns that have common starts: plou, plu, plo, ploe ... From my research, the "PLOE" prefix in names means "Parish" and the prefix appears in several different forms. Plou in Northern Brittany, Plo in the Southwest, and Ple or Pleu in the Northeast. In some cases, the second part of the name would be either an adjective (Pleumeur for "great parish" or Pleubian for "little parish") or a local feature (Plougastel for the parish of the castle).

I restructured this blog several times, going from a "by day" to "by department" format. We thought this may be better for people who later, may be looking for something specific. Plus, some days were more interesting than others :-) So I'll separate it mainly by Department although the way up and the way back, we weren't in either of the departments in Brittany, so I kept them separate. Within each department, I'll have a list of the villages that we visited and a page (or two) for various walks and hikes we took with Lucy.

This is part 1, which handles driving up to Brittany and the first 2 weeks in the Finistère department. Part 2, which I'll post shortly (and will update this with a link), will handle the Morbihan department and getting back home.

We headed out and stopped first at the town of Marmande, which is famous for tomatoes and somewhat known for strawberries as well before stopping at a nice B&B. As we started out for the last half of the drive, we noticed that the traffic was absolutely horrible! Tom had seen something on the news about this, and so we decided to skip most of what we had planned for the day so that we could get to our Gîte (a vacation "apartment") on time. We needed to get Lucy a walk to tire her out before we got into the car for the long ride and found a nice walk through some fields. We then enjoyed a nice seafood dinner near the Old Port of La Fôret-Fouesnant, our base for the next 2 weeks.

Last year, we didn't spend much time in Finistère so we decided to start this year in that department. We spent 2 weeks there, just outside of the town of La Fôret-Fouesnant. Finistère is the westernmost department of France and is the "most coastal" department (not counting overseas departments/territories). Of its 279 towns/villages, 118 are located on the coast. There are over 775 miles of coastline and accounts for almost 25% of the entire Brittany coast-line.

Then we moved South. After spending 2 weeks in Finistère, we headed south into the department of Morbihan, which I will have in my Part 2 blog.