Santander For our European road trip this year we thought we'd go slightly further afield. As the Honda still hadn't been to Spain (quite), we decided to get the ferry from Plymouth to Santander and then drive back home. All in we drove 1,429 miles in 9 days, mostly not on motorways and mostly with the roof down, although both extreme sunshine (in the UK, not in Spain/France!) and persistent, drizzly rain forced us to pop the roof back up again on more occasions than I would have preferred (i.e. any at all).
Cottage Saturday - As it was a fairly long way to Plymouth from our house, we thought we'd break the journey up by stopping in to see Judith's parents in Crewkerne, which was handily about half way there. They were even good enough to put us up overnight in this lovely cottage that they rent out through Rural Retreats. Very nice.
Ferry Sunday - We left Judith's parents and headed off to Plymouth. It was majorly scorchio on the way down, which was okay while we were moving, but sitting in the car waiting to board the ferry it was just too much to bear and we were forced to put the roof up to give us some much needed shade. I can't think of another occasion that the roof's gone up because of too much sunshine!We left Plymouth at 4pm.
Room Onboard the Brittany Ferry Pont-Aven and we found our cabin. The last time we were on a ship was when we had the suite (and butler) on the cruise ship Arcadia, so the bar had been set pretty high.
Room Doh! The cabin was about half the size of our bathroom on Arcadia. Still, it was comfortable, had everything we need (except a butler) within arm's reach and we're only going to be in there for one night.
Church Monday - Super smooth crossing in lovely weather and we arrived in Santander just before lunch. First stop was the picturesque town of Santillana Del Mar, which was only a dozen-or-so miles from Santander. This is a picture of the Collegiate Church there.
Old Building A miscellaneous old building in Santillana Del Mar.
Coast On to the coast road. Very scenic.
National Park We headed inland to the Reserva Nacional de Saja and wound our way up into the foothills of the Picos de Europa. The road climbed to a height of around 5,000 feet, which is where this photo was taken. As scenic as it was, it was necessary to pay extra attention to the road ahead as there were lots of cattle wandering unrestricted. It was common to come round a sharp bend to find a few animals standing in the road or meandering across it.
Parador Finally we made it to our hotel - the Parador at Limpias. It was a lovely hotel set in extensive grounds on the edge of town. We had a very nice dinner in their restaurant.
More Coast Tuesday - We started our journey north by first going east along the northern Spanish coast where there were lots of nice views like this to be seen. Given the number of people that head to the the resorts in the south of Spain, I'm surprised that more don't come to the north. The scenery is much better.
Biarritz Just after lunch we arrived in Biarritz. Looked okay.During the afternoon we pressed on northwards. This bit of France was a lot like a massive Center Parcs and appeared to be where many French people come on their holidays and even at this time of year there were a lot of people in "camping cars" (motor homes), which made for frustratingly slow progress at times.
Dunes du Pyla Eventually we made it to the Dunes du Pyla, which are enormous sand dunes (apparently the largest in Europe) just outside of Arcachon, our scheduled overnight stop. The dunes are around 100 metres high and only run for a few miles along this stretch of coast. Because the sand is so fine, they've had to install the plastic steps shown in the photo to help people get to the top.
View East Nice view from the top looking inland.
View North Looking north towards Arcachon.
View South Looking south along the length of the dunes.
View West Looking west.It was getting fairly late when we left the dunes. I wanted to hang around to see the sunset, but Judith insisted that we pressed on to the hotel, which was only a few miles away. This is where I had my first Tom Tom disaster. For some reason my Tom Tom (which I had bought specially for this trip) thought the Ibis hotel we were scheduled to stay in was right in the middle of Arcachon. Having been told that we had "reached your destination", it becames apparent that we indeed had not and were in fact nowhere near our destination.After some messing about, we finally found the hotel - about 5 miles away. Unfortunately, we had turned up at 8:30pm and our reservation apparently only guaranteed our room until 8:00pm, so they had given it to someone else! And now they were full!!. The hotel staff were apologetic and helpful and managed to find us a room at Bordeaux Airport, about 40 miles away, which frankly sounded a bit pants. After a brief discussion, we decided to immediately press on to our next overnight stop in Chatelaillon Plage. This was around 140 miles further north, which was a bit of a blow as we'd already been driving for nearly 10 hours already.The drive was a bit rubbish because it started raining shortly after we set off, but the lovely French motorways were virtually deserted. We arrived at the Mercure hotel in Chatelaillon Plage at around 11:15pm.
Chatelaillon Plage Wednesday - The hotel was on the sea front and the weather was lovely. This small harbour was just a few hundred metres from the hotel.
Harbour We spent the morning walking on the sea front. In the afternoon we drove the short distance to La Rochelle. The town was really picturesque, but also really, really busy. There was some sort of event going on, so we ended up driving around for half-an-hour looking for a parking space, but not finding one. We decided to go back to the hotel and come back first thing the following day when it will hopefully be quieter.
Harbour Thursday - Doh! The weather was completely pants, as this picture of yesterday's sunny harbour shows. So our plan to go into La Rochelle was ditched and we decided to head north immediately.We headed for St Nazaire in the pouring rain.
St Nazaire Lots to do in St Nazaire, even in the rain. There's a submarine exhibition, a cruise ship exhibition, a tour of the Airbus factory, a tour of a cruise ship being built, etc, etc. The ticket office for all of these activities is housed in the old U-boat pens shown in the photo. And the ticket office closed for a couple of hours for lunch exactly five minutes before we arrived in the very pouring rain. Not happy at all.After a brief discussion we decided that we didn't really fancy sitting about in the pouring rain for a couple of hours waiting for the ticket office to open again, so we pressed on to Quiberon.
Quiberon Quiberon can be found on a picturesque peninsula in the Bay of Biscay and our hotel was situated on a rocky seafront just outside of town. It's prices indicated that it fancied itself as something really quite special, but the practical reality was a little less impressive. Which is not to say that is wasn't still very nice. It just wasn't quite as nice as its room rates thought it was.
Beach We walked the mile-or-so into town from the hotel. The beach was nice, although not that appealing in this weather.
Fishing Friday - The weather was a bit rubbish again. Having been spanked for an enormous amount of cash for dinner in the hotel last night, we didn't fancy being robbed of another 50 Euros for breakfast, so we headed into town and ended up having a really nice breakfast in a seafront diner/restaurant. For 15 Euros we got coffee, orange juice, bread, choc-au-pain, ham and eggs.On the way out of town we passed dozens of cars parked by the road, so we stopped to see what’s going on. Out on the beach there were hundreds of people. The looked like a Lowry painting. Presumably they were looking for cockles or mussels or similar. Quite why they didn't have to go to work on a Friday morning I can only guess.We drove more-or-less due north, straight across the sticky-out bit of France (I think it's called Brittany) for the only stage of our journey that took us more than a few miles from the coast.
Cape Frehel After a couple of hours we reached the north coast at Cape Frehel and the weather was much improved. Cape Frehel is situated on a particularly rocky and picturesque stretch of coast.
Lighthouse The main non-natural feature of Cape Frehel is the lighthouse shown in the picture.
Cliffs The cliffs were pretty high, as you can see from this picture. You can just about make out the people walking about at the top.
Fort La Latte A few miles east of Cape Frehel is Fort La Latte. The fort appeared to be immaculately well preserved, although their literature indicated that it had been destroyed and rebuilt a few times over the centuries. Whatever, it still looked very nice.
Sea View Another view of the fort.
View A view from the roof of the fort’s highest tower, looking more or less due south and just about managing to show the whole small peninsula that the fort is situated on.
Yachts Looking out to sea from the fort. Although there wasn't much going on in this photo, I find looking at it rather relaxing. I particularly like the way the horizon has blended almost seamlessly into the sky.
Dinard Late in the afternoon we arrived at our hotel in Dinard. The hotel (the Novotel) was very nice and this was the view from our room.We had another lovely dinner in the hotel’s restaurant.
Mont-Saint-Michel Saturday - Our last day in France and the weather had gone a bit grey again. Our first stop today was Le Mont-Saint-Michel, which, judging by the number of cars and coaches here already, was possibly the most popular tourist destination in northern France by quite a significant margin.We parked in a "car park" that was underwater a couple of hours earlier. Lots of signs in many languages told us that the "car park" would be underwater again at 18:20. This presumably meant that it was in my interests to ensure that my car had been moved before then.
Street Le Mont-Saint-Michel was a very impressive place indeed, even with the grey weather and hoards of tourists. The lower town was primarily composed of these narrow street that are reminiscent of the Shambles in York. They were full of shops and restaurants.
Steps We pressed onward and upward to the Abbey that sits at the top.
View This was the view from pretty close to the top, looking back along the causeway that connects Le Mont-Saint-Michel to the mainland. The highest bit will stay above the water (that's where the people staying in the hotels on Le Mont-Saint-Michel park). The rest, which is where I was parked, get submerged by each high tide.We continued the tour for a couple more hours, then had a very nice, albeit rather cramped and hectic, lunch in one of the restaurants in the lower town before we continued our journey east towards Normandy.
American War Cemetery The American War Cemetary at Omaha Beach. I would highly recommend that anyone vising this region of France visit here.
Bayeux Having left Omaha Beach, we travelled to Bayeux, where the tapestry lives. This was the view down the high street.
Bayeux Cathedral
Tank A tank outside the Musée Memorial de la Bataille de Normandie, which was unfortunately closed by the time we arrived.
British Cemetery Just across the road from the museum was the British War Cemetery. As you might well expect, it was not as big or as flashy as the American one, but it was no less impressive for that.
Arromanches We left Bayeux and headed back to the coast at Arromanches, which is where the British forces built their own artifical harbour to assist them in bringing all of their stuff ashore. The remains of that harbour were still clearly visibly. It was still an impressive site and must have been incredible in its day.As darkness fell we continued east towards Ouistreham, which was where our ferry departed.As we arrived a couple of hours early, we had a very nice dinner in a restaurant Ouistreham, just outside the ferry terminal.The ferry left at 11:00pm.
Ferry Sunday - The ferry arrived in Portsmouth at 6:30am. It had been another glassy-smooth crossing. This ferry was much smaller than the one we went out on and consequently somewhat less well equipped. But it was still very nice (although we didn't get the opportunity to try out their very nice looking restaurant).We were one of the first cars off the ferry and parked back on our drive in Fleet before 8am.All in all, it had been a good week despite the somewhat mixed weather conditions. I’d definitely like to go and spend a bit more time on the northern coast of Spain (preferably having traveled there on the super-nice ferry again) and I also want to go and spend more time looking at the Normandy beaches and visiting the museums and towns. Things to stick in the diary for next year perhaps.