Day 58: Mur de Bretagne to Locmaria-Berrien

May 23, 2018

If you are wondering where Locmaria-Berrien might be or thinking it sounds like a strange place in some enchanted kingdom, so are we. Stick around and we will slowly pedal up to it by the end of this page.

Breakfast at the Pear Blossom House was extremely basic, but it was enlivened by personalities of our hosts. Eleven year old George, in his totally unassuming way, would be the star of the show just by being eleven years old.

George took us to visit his chickens, each of which has a name. As often happens, the whole B&B family was there by the street to see us on our way.

George and his grandfather at the breakfast table

We did a quick turn up into the village, finding it quite small and plain, but with a nice church and also the Chapel Sainte Suzanne.

The bike path (only temporarily, it turns out) had left the Canal and now directed us up onto a ridge overlooking the Lac de Guerledan. This is the long lake created by a hydro dam near Mur. As we cycled along we got glimpses down to the lake. Now that we were in fact off the Canal we could get a slightly different sense of the surrounding countryside. Not that we are experts on England, but this feels to us like the south of that country. As such, it also feels somewhat like our home area on the south end of Vancouver Island. One evidence of this is that, unlike in Provence, any cherry trees here are still unripe, but there are scads of rhododendrons in bloom. In fact the rhodos are a bit of a phenomenon, with some having attained full tree size.

Most are purple, but some other colours were around

Although at least one of our maps showed the bike path continuing toward Roscoff while only briefly touching the Canal again, our route in fact returned to the Canal and stayed with it for a further 40 km, all the way to Carhaix. One of the benefits of this was that we passed directly by the Abbaye de Bon Repos. This former Cistercian monastery was founded in 1184, but like so many, came to a bad end in 1789 with the Revolution. It fell to ruins, but has recently been partially restored.

A view from one corner. See the destroyed wall on the right hand side.

The abbey included a giftshop that was really a book store. We find this kind of shop tremendously instructive when we are in a new region, as the books typically cover so many aspects of the place - the history and culture past and present, cuisine, plants and animals, literature, art, mythology, wines, cheeses, and for us of special interest - maps and bike routes. Typically we want to buy them all, and in the past have settled for just a few slim volumes. But we have found that a few volumes here and there end up becoming quite a pile, so this time we are practicing restraint. This doesn't stop us, or course, from photographing some that we say we will order later by mail.

I have included here a selection of photos of the books in the shop. This covers only a tiny fraction of what was on display, but if you look carefully it will give you some idea, as it did for us, of what this land of Brittany is all about.

Culture, science, health, etc. of the Middle Ages

Nature. That book about nature by the roadside makes any photos I have made look sick.

Neolithic megaliths - we will be passing at least one site later on.

A whole book on those crazy place names, plus sorcery and saintes.

We also want to specially remember this book covering five greenways in Brittany

and this view of so many bike guides from Ouest France

After the excitement of the Abbey, we were back on the Canal for a good long while. That is just a matter of enjoying the wonderful country scenes:

Eventually we came to the point where the route to Morlaix and Roscoff really did diverge from the Canal to Brest. We took the right turn, and of course immediately found ourselves in a climb. We persevered through to Carhaix, which we were referring to as car-hay. I stopped two ladies by the path and asked them how they really say it. To me it sounded like Klingon - Kaaarrgheh. These Breton names are quite perplexing. It's hard to remember them, because they don't trigger any hooks in our brains. In town, I looked at a sign like the one below, and could make nothing of it.

It took Dodie to at least point out that the sign was just pointing to two places, each with a French name and a Breton one.

We had only one objective in Carhaix and that was to stock up on some food, because the place where we had booked a B&B did not sound at all like a metropolis with any food outlets. Sticking to the outskirts of Carhaix we naturally did not see any interesting medieval stuff. But we did find E. Leclerc. E. Leclerc is the French equivalent of a Walmart Super Center. The only thing, of course, Dodie came out with eminently edible, high quality, though packaged, food.

A few spins around the rond-point and we were on our way, looking for the B&B in Locmaria-Berrien, some 16 km away. We knew we first had to go to Poullaouen, and we had fun trying to say that to each other for a while. we also knew that Locmaria-Berrien was in La Haie-Douar, but we did not know quite what that was. It was clearly something on the order of Le Coscoat, La Salle, Lescom, and Le Stancou - but what are these things? Fortunately the GPS knew exactly where to go, sort of, and we had only overshot a short bit when we ran into Jotto - our Dutch host walking Charlie, the dog. They soon led us to a beautiful house, where we met Wil, his wife. The bikes went into a nice garage and we were soon in yet another elegant room in an old house.

The canal path has been fine, but often it is not pavement but rather hard packed clay with fine sand. Consequently we and the bikes are covered in dust. We took the opportunity of being at a home to pull the bikes out and wash them. They look way better, and will surely go faster now! That's good, because tomorrow we are zooming to the coast, and our next stay will be near the beach! It's at Plougasnou - for what it's worth!

Elegant La Colline des Renards at Locmaria-Berrien. That's Jotto taking Charlie inside. Charlie speaks Dutch, English, and French!

Today's ride: 85 km (53 miles)
Total: 3,906 km (2,426 miles)

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