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oloriela.k.a. the catch-up saga continueth.
Holiday time! I don't think I have the stamina to do a day-by-day travelogue (nor will anyone read it, really), so it'll be a massive picspam of doom along with some blathering to accompany the pictures, not in chronological order but rather sorted by places or topics. Or whatever, really.
(Wow, doing a picspam on LJ is effing labour-intensive. I forgot. I'm so spoiled by Wordpress' gallery feature! :P)
For about five years, Britanny has been a place of longing, rest & recuperation to my mind. I can't honestly say why (part of it is probably sea longing, but there's a lot of coast in the world), but it began after Felix' birth and has not (yet?) been replaced by any other place. Which is well enough; the previous resting spaces of my soul, Scotland and Canada (TM), took a lot more travelling. Thanks to my not-at-all subtle influence, we've been spending most of our vacations in the past years in Britanny, in different constellations (with my parents; with my parents and Jörg's mother; with Jörg's mother and brother; just the four of us) and in two different spots (first, Trévou-Treguignec in the Côte d'Armor - armor has nothing to do with armour, but with Aremorica - region, later Crozon-Morgat in Finistère). The latter was our destination for this year's "summer" holidays, too. Even though I don't properly speak the language, my soul feels at home there in a way that I only really know from, well, home - to the extent that I was seriously daydreaming about being able to buy the decrepit house next door from our holiday home and leaving our house (which otherwise I would swear to only leave behind feet-first) forever for it.
The regional slogan of Finistère (the Romans called it finis terrae, "end of the world") is Tout commence en Finistère, "It all starts at the end of the world", which proved quite appropriate for what felt - still feels, really - like a massive recharge, if not a rebirth. (I am aware of how melodramatic that sounds, but I assure you the sentiment is real. You can see how real it is by the fact that I actually voice it.)
For several reasons it turned out perfect that we had planned to go to Britanny this september: For one, this summer really only began at the end of August, and after the soul-draining encounter with the bossman from hell, the prospect of only a few weeks until BRITANNY!!1! felt like the one thing that kept me together. I don't think I was burned-out (which would be a bit fast after only a couple of months and not really that much work); it was more that I am a naïve person and dealing with someone who systematically abused other people's attempts at being decent people genuinely took a chunk out of me. I have no better description for it. -- Jörg, who has in fact been toeing (and occasionally crossing) the line to burn-out several times in the past years, needed the holiday anyway. Felix found it very hard to accept that he wouldn't be seeing my parents for three weeks (two weeks that we were vacationing, and one week afterwards when they in turn were on vacation), but eventually could be consoled that he would be permitted to climb the black rock that was deemed to dangerous on our last visit there. (In the end, he didn't want to leave, a sentiment I shared.)
Even though Britanny is almost "next door" (especially by American standards ;)), it is 1200 km from our place to the Crozon peninsula, so we did a stop-over in Normandy so the kids could stretch their legs and frolic in the sand, while we grown-ups let the gentle waves of the English Channel lap our feet and lick away the weariness of the road and (in particular) the past weeks. In the golden light of evening, the beach of St-Laurent-sur-Mer was the most peaceful place in the world - at least until one lifted one's eyes to the hills and there saw the bunkers and memorials. I felt a bit guilty about enjoying myself on that beautiful wide beach (does anyone want a Nerdanel in Alqualondë plotbunny?), but the predominant feeling was, already, relief.
(Click on pic leads to slightly larger pic, as usual.)
We had a surprisingly good (and shockingly huge) dinner menu in a bistro. The local beer was called D-Day. Another guilty pleasure. -- The next morning, the grown-ups (without me) visited the Cimetière Americain and the bunkers while the kids and I went down to the sea again.
A tiny cat tried to hitch a ride on our rental car (since there were six of us, we had rented a transporter instead of using two cars).
We stopped there again on the way back, two weeks later. The fact that local teenagers played a fun round of boule at the feet of one of the memorials, and that a wedding party went for lots of cheerful pictures on the beach, somewhat alleviated the sense of guilt about Having A Nice Time On A Past Site Of Carnage.
But now we're still heading westwards! The weather on the second leg of the journey was unpleasant, with occasional heavy rains and, later, heavy mists. We were slightly worried that we would spend our two soul-revitalising weeks in a soul-draining grey fog, but just as we reached the peninsula, it began to clear up. We found the house we'd rented in spite of it lacking a "proper" address without resorting to the GPS coordinates we'd kindly been given. (This! Is! Britanny!) Our landlady assured us that the weather forecast for the next week was friendly, which turned out to be correct. -- From Jörg's and my bedroom window, we could (just barely) see the Atlantic ocean, and its steady sloshing became our nightly lullaby. Some views of the house and out of our bedroom window, on different days:
In the second week, we were regularly visited by a pretty cat. We were a bit worried that she wanted to adopt us, but as it turned out, the landlady was looking after her daughter's cat. Because the daughter - and the cat - had on previous occasions spent time at the holiday home, the cat obviously considered the holiday home part of her territory. Fine with us. (I had to negotiate that fact using my horrible school French.)
The Crozon peninsula has a peculiarly rugged shape, so it mostly consists of shore. (This has supposedly been less in Days of Yore - the region has its own Atlantis myth about the legendary city of Ys, which supposedly was located in the large bay between Morgat and Douarnenez in the Middle Ages (TM). It was immeasurably rich (these places always are), but Dahut, the king's daughter, unfortunately let the devil seduce her. She handed him the keys to the kingdom, which he used to unlock the gates of the dyke so the city was flooded. King Gradlon escaped to Quimper, but he only succeeded because he cast his daughter into the waves first. She became a mermaid and is occasionally sighted to this very day, often before storm floods. -- In the place of Ys, Paris (Par-Ys, hah hah!) rose to greatness. Legend has it that on the day that Paris sinks, Ys will resurface; the Parisians flout that in their city motto, Fluctuat nec mergitur - "It floats [or "is shaken by waves"], but it isn't drowned". A great motto for Gondor also, n'est-ce pas?
Supposedly, Douarnenez also features the tomb of Tristan (of "Tristan and Yseult" fame. Ys-eult, hah hah!) on the Île Tristan. We didn't go there though.
Anyway, this is where we lay our scene:
As you can also see, it's part of a natural reserve, which mostly means salt marshes and some woods.
From our previous visit, we knew that the bay between Crozon and Camaret features the most gorgeous beaches, our favourite being the Plage de Kersiguenou (Ker- being Breton for -ton and thus very common in place names), where we spent a lot of time. It's got everything: Beautiful scenery for the grown-ups, rocks and shells for me, fine sand for the kids (and the young at heart), enough place to walk around, cliffs and caves and scenic rocks. And, of course, the sea - sometimes very close, sometimes far away. We were there around the autumnal equinox and the moon happened to be full, so the tidal coefficients were among the highest of the year or, for that matter, in general (the maximum that we saw was 111, with 0 being "no difference between high and low tide" and 120 being "Akallabêth Now").
I took a shitload of pictures on that beach (as you will see forthwith) and many of them actually show the same rock formation on different days (you will not actually see how many, because I only uploaded the very best of). It honestly looked different every day. No wonder the impressionists loved the Finistère. Not only was living cheap there (back then), but the landscape and light genuinely appear different every single day.
This large black chunk of rock and its smaller neighbour were our usual haunt (unless the tide was too high). Climbing opportunities for Felix, tidal pools for the kids to romp in (after two days, they suddenly developed fear of the "real" waves. Well, not so suddenly in Julian's case, because he was swept off his feet by a wave, but Felix didn't even witness that scene.) No clue how this black, metallic rock gets there (as you can see, the naturally grown rock of the cliffs looks completely different).
The kids are wearing neoprene suits because the wind was already quite cold, at least when you were wet...
It's also so very pretty, but as these tormented rocks show, brutal forces must have been at work to create that landscape, and are still wearing on the rocks.
Look, it's a forest!
This is the cliff behind our black rock (at the far right)... at around the tidal minimum. At maximum, the water reaches the cliffs.
There were two amazing rock formations on either side of the bay. This is the so-called Chateau de Dinan (Castle of Dinan). Dinan is actually a lot further east (near St-Malo) and the destruction of its castle is featured on the Bayeux tapestry, but maybe it looked similar to this?
The other fascinating set of rocks was the Cape of Penn Hir (Breton for "long end"), with all these lumps of rock reaching out into the sea as if the land just couldn't decide to end. The final triangular chunk is called the Tas de Pois (French for "heap of peas"). I forgot the names of the others.
On the weekend or after work (if that happens to be at low tide), lots of locals come out to the beach to do pêche à la pied, that is, fishing on foot. You can "pick" blue mussels, razor clams, oysters, abalones, scallops, langoustines and other tasty seafood morsels in and around the rock pools. There are regulations for what size mussels (or whatever) you're allowed to take home, and at what time of the year and in what quantity, just as there are for "normal" hunting. As long as you stay within these regulations and don't use your "catch" commercially, you don't need a licence.
With Jörg's and Marc's fish and seafood allergy (and my complete ignorance as to how to prepare, say, scallops), we obviously didn't participate in the pêche à la pied. We just went to the beach to enjoy ourselves.
To help the kids (and as a result, us ;)) master the long walk to our favourite end of the beach, we had taken our handcart along (another advantage of the rental transporter!). That made things a bit easier...
After a few days, we started to go a bit OTT with sandcastles. It started with harmless walls and hills, then I built a ball path for the kids, then suddenly we were all competing in doing more and more spectacular sandcastles. Except for the mother-in-law, who was content to read, observe and mock Marc's attempts at building a tower (she said it looked like a groundhog, which really hurt Marc. He retaliated by calling her Murmeltiermutter (roughly, Granny Groundhog), which amused the kids greatly, so it sort of stuck. Served her right.).
Anyway, from humble beginnings...
... to increasingly ambitious projects.
My final contribution to the Stony Family Sand-Sculpting Championship 2016: Dahut of Ys.
(Note to self: Just because you can write Nerdanel doesn't make you a sculptress. Boo.)
I still have 60 more pics prepared (and hundreds more to sort), but I think I've picspammed enough for a single entry. Also, getting tired of the copypasta game. So let's conclude it at that, and continue some other day, with the Stony Family's Cultural And Historical Exploits In Britanny. Kouign Amann for you if you actually read this far!
Holiday time! I don't think I have the stamina to do a day-by-day travelogue (nor will anyone read it, really), so it'll be a massive picspam of doom along with some blathering to accompany the pictures, not in chronological order but rather sorted by places or topics. Or whatever, really.
(Wow, doing a picspam on LJ is effing labour-intensive. I forgot. I'm so spoiled by Wordpress' gallery feature! :P)
For about five years, Britanny has been a place of longing, rest & recuperation to my mind. I can't honestly say why (part of it is probably sea longing, but there's a lot of coast in the world), but it began after Felix' birth and has not (yet?) been replaced by any other place. Which is well enough; the previous resting spaces of my soul, Scotland and Canada (TM), took a lot more travelling. Thanks to my not-at-all subtle influence, we've been spending most of our vacations in the past years in Britanny, in different constellations (with my parents; with my parents and Jörg's mother; with Jörg's mother and brother; just the four of us) and in two different spots (first, Trévou-Treguignec in the Côte d'Armor - armor has nothing to do with armour, but with Aremorica - region, later Crozon-Morgat in Finistère). The latter was our destination for this year's "summer" holidays, too. Even though I don't properly speak the language, my soul feels at home there in a way that I only really know from, well, home - to the extent that I was seriously daydreaming about being able to buy the decrepit house next door from our holiday home and leaving our house (which otherwise I would swear to only leave behind feet-first) forever for it.
The regional slogan of Finistère (the Romans called it finis terrae, "end of the world") is Tout commence en Finistère, "It all starts at the end of the world", which proved quite appropriate for what felt - still feels, really - like a massive recharge, if not a rebirth. (I am aware of how melodramatic that sounds, but I assure you the sentiment is real. You can see how real it is by the fact that I actually voice it.)
For several reasons it turned out perfect that we had planned to go to Britanny this september: For one, this summer really only began at the end of August, and after the soul-draining encounter with the bossman from hell, the prospect of only a few weeks until BRITANNY!!1! felt like the one thing that kept me together. I don't think I was burned-out (which would be a bit fast after only a couple of months and not really that much work); it was more that I am a naïve person and dealing with someone who systematically abused other people's attempts at being decent people genuinely took a chunk out of me. I have no better description for it. -- Jörg, who has in fact been toeing (and occasionally crossing) the line to burn-out several times in the past years, needed the holiday anyway. Felix found it very hard to accept that he wouldn't be seeing my parents for three weeks (two weeks that we were vacationing, and one week afterwards when they in turn were on vacation), but eventually could be consoled that he would be permitted to climb the black rock that was deemed to dangerous on our last visit there. (In the end, he didn't want to leave, a sentiment I shared.)
Even though Britanny is almost "next door" (especially by American standards ;)), it is 1200 km from our place to the Crozon peninsula, so we did a stop-over in Normandy so the kids could stretch their legs and frolic in the sand, while we grown-ups let the gentle waves of the English Channel lap our feet and lick away the weariness of the road and (in particular) the past weeks. In the golden light of evening, the beach of St-Laurent-sur-Mer was the most peaceful place in the world - at least until one lifted one's eyes to the hills and there saw the bunkers and memorials. I felt a bit guilty about enjoying myself on that beautiful wide beach (does anyone want a Nerdanel in Alqualondë plotbunny?), but the predominant feeling was, already, relief.
(Click on pic leads to slightly larger pic, as usual.)
We had a surprisingly good (and shockingly huge) dinner menu in a bistro. The local beer was called D-Day. Another guilty pleasure. -- The next morning, the grown-ups (without me) visited the Cimetière Americain and the bunkers while the kids and I went down to the sea again.
A tiny cat tried to hitch a ride on our rental car (since there were six of us, we had rented a transporter instead of using two cars).
We stopped there again on the way back, two weeks later. The fact that local teenagers played a fun round of boule at the feet of one of the memorials, and that a wedding party went for lots of cheerful pictures on the beach, somewhat alleviated the sense of guilt about Having A Nice Time On A Past Site Of Carnage.
But now we're still heading westwards! The weather on the second leg of the journey was unpleasant, with occasional heavy rains and, later, heavy mists. We were slightly worried that we would spend our two soul-revitalising weeks in a soul-draining grey fog, but just as we reached the peninsula, it began to clear up. We found the house we'd rented in spite of it lacking a "proper" address without resorting to the GPS coordinates we'd kindly been given. (This! Is! Britanny!) Our landlady assured us that the weather forecast for the next week was friendly, which turned out to be correct. -- From Jörg's and my bedroom window, we could (just barely) see the Atlantic ocean, and its steady sloshing became our nightly lullaby. Some views of the house and out of our bedroom window, on different days:
In the second week, we were regularly visited by a pretty cat. We were a bit worried that she wanted to adopt us, but as it turned out, the landlady was looking after her daughter's cat. Because the daughter - and the cat - had on previous occasions spent time at the holiday home, the cat obviously considered the holiday home part of her territory. Fine with us. (I had to negotiate that fact using my horrible school French.)
The Crozon peninsula has a peculiarly rugged shape, so it mostly consists of shore. (This has supposedly been less in Days of Yore - the region has its own Atlantis myth about the legendary city of Ys, which supposedly was located in the large bay between Morgat and Douarnenez in the Middle Ages (TM). It was immeasurably rich (these places always are), but Dahut, the king's daughter, unfortunately let the devil seduce her. She handed him the keys to the kingdom, which he used to unlock the gates of the dyke so the city was flooded. King Gradlon escaped to Quimper, but he only succeeded because he cast his daughter into the waves first. She became a mermaid and is occasionally sighted to this very day, often before storm floods. -- In the place of Ys, Paris (Par-Ys, hah hah!) rose to greatness. Legend has it that on the day that Paris sinks, Ys will resurface; the Parisians flout that in their city motto, Fluctuat nec mergitur - "It floats [or "is shaken by waves"], but it isn't drowned". A great motto for Gondor also, n'est-ce pas?
Supposedly, Douarnenez also features the tomb of Tristan (of "Tristan and Yseult" fame. Ys-eult, hah hah!) on the Île Tristan. We didn't go there though.
Anyway, this is where we lay our scene:
As you can also see, it's part of a natural reserve, which mostly means salt marshes and some woods.
From our previous visit, we knew that the bay between Crozon and Camaret features the most gorgeous beaches, our favourite being the Plage de Kersiguenou (Ker- being Breton for -ton and thus very common in place names), where we spent a lot of time. It's got everything: Beautiful scenery for the grown-ups, rocks and shells for me, fine sand for the kids (and the young at heart), enough place to walk around, cliffs and caves and scenic rocks. And, of course, the sea - sometimes very close, sometimes far away. We were there around the autumnal equinox and the moon happened to be full, so the tidal coefficients were among the highest of the year or, for that matter, in general (the maximum that we saw was 111, with 0 being "no difference between high and low tide" and 120 being "Akallabêth Now").
I took a shitload of pictures on that beach (as you will see forthwith) and many of them actually show the same rock formation on different days (you will not actually see how many, because I only uploaded the very best of). It honestly looked different every day. No wonder the impressionists loved the Finistère. Not only was living cheap there (back then), but the landscape and light genuinely appear different every single day.
This large black chunk of rock and its smaller neighbour were our usual haunt (unless the tide was too high). Climbing opportunities for Felix, tidal pools for the kids to romp in (after two days, they suddenly developed fear of the "real" waves. Well, not so suddenly in Julian's case, because he was swept off his feet by a wave, but Felix didn't even witness that scene.) No clue how this black, metallic rock gets there (as you can see, the naturally grown rock of the cliffs looks completely different).
The kids are wearing neoprene suits because the wind was already quite cold, at least when you were wet...
It's also so very pretty, but as these tormented rocks show, brutal forces must have been at work to create that landscape, and are still wearing on the rocks.
Look, it's a forest!
This is the cliff behind our black rock (at the far right)... at around the tidal minimum. At maximum, the water reaches the cliffs.
There were two amazing rock formations on either side of the bay. This is the so-called Chateau de Dinan (Castle of Dinan). Dinan is actually a lot further east (near St-Malo) and the destruction of its castle is featured on the Bayeux tapestry, but maybe it looked similar to this?
The other fascinating set of rocks was the Cape of Penn Hir (Breton for "long end"), with all these lumps of rock reaching out into the sea as if the land just couldn't decide to end. The final triangular chunk is called the Tas de Pois (French for "heap of peas"). I forgot the names of the others.
On the weekend or after work (if that happens to be at low tide), lots of locals come out to the beach to do pêche à la pied, that is, fishing on foot. You can "pick" blue mussels, razor clams, oysters, abalones, scallops, langoustines and other tasty seafood morsels in and around the rock pools. There are regulations for what size mussels (or whatever) you're allowed to take home, and at what time of the year and in what quantity, just as there are for "normal" hunting. As long as you stay within these regulations and don't use your "catch" commercially, you don't need a licence.
With Jörg's and Marc's fish and seafood allergy (and my complete ignorance as to how to prepare, say, scallops), we obviously didn't participate in the pêche à la pied. We just went to the beach to enjoy ourselves.
To help the kids (and as a result, us ;)) master the long walk to our favourite end of the beach, we had taken our handcart along (another advantage of the rental transporter!). That made things a bit easier...
After a few days, we started to go a bit OTT with sandcastles. It started with harmless walls and hills, then I built a ball path for the kids, then suddenly we were all competing in doing more and more spectacular sandcastles. Except for the mother-in-law, who was content to read, observe and mock Marc's attempts at building a tower (she said it looked like a groundhog, which really hurt Marc. He retaliated by calling her Murmeltiermutter (roughly, Granny Groundhog), which amused the kids greatly, so it sort of stuck. Served her right.).
Anyway, from humble beginnings...
... to increasingly ambitious projects.
My final contribution to the Stony Family Sand-Sculpting Championship 2016: Dahut of Ys.
(Note to self: Just because you can write Nerdanel doesn't make you a sculptress. Boo.)
I still have 60 more pics prepared (and hundreds more to sort), but I think I've picspammed enough for a single entry. Also, getting tired of the copypasta game. So let's conclude it at that, and continue some other day, with the Stony Family's Cultural And Historical Exploits In Britanny. Kouign Amann for you if you actually read this far!
