On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Steve from Mendocino
My ex-wife, Anne-Marie, had family in Paris, the Basque country, and a bit in southern Beaujolais so our travel was mostly in those areas. The welcome was warm and the food and lodging free and delightful. Brittany, though, has a great deal to offer both in its historical and cultural uniqueness as well as its culinary offerings. The photos below are from the few pictures I took during my first visit to Brittany some 50 years ago.
My only specific memory of that trip was a meal of oysters and Muscadet while sitting at the window of an inexpensive restaurant in Cancale as we looked over the oyster beds just below. Muscadet is cheap and famously good pairing with oysters. Of my two subsequent trips in the area, my most notable memory was when I went under an underpass on the autoroute and noticed a little car hugged up and parked by the bridge. I was speeding, and I said to my partner “I just got a ticket.” I continued for several more miles up to the toll booth, and a French highway patrolman sauntered up in his nearly knee high leather boots and motioned me over.
I thought it would be clever to pretend I spoke no French, and have my partner, who had been taking lessons, do all the talking and pretend to translate for me. It turns out that the highway patrol have a book with topics they need to say to people like me. They point to the sentence in French and the offender gets to read the translation in their own language. Thus it took extra time and I had to show no reaction to snide observations they made about us.
As a bonus, they did not accept credit cards, and I was faced with having to hitchhike back and forth to Rennes on a Saturday to somehow secure cash in Renne and then hitchhike back to ransom my car. Fortunately, I was able to talk the toll booth operator into cashing some traveler’s checks. We drove off and treated ourselves to a very nice meal of seafood and Champagne in a quaint coastal restaurant to ease the pain.
Mont St. Michel at sunset
Light, scenery, well-being
Striking architecture, particularly the clock tower
Brittany is more actively Catholic than other regions in France. I wanted to capture that in this graveyard picture.
Quiet scenes like this were a delight. I’m not sure how much of this remains in France.
These monuments turn up here and there in the area. The name escapes my increasingly rickety mind at the moment. I apologize.
Art
The walls of St. Malo at low tide
eclare
That first photo…wow! Gorgeous.
evodevo
Yep…liked the small part of eastern Brittany we saw in 2006. Stayed in a B&B in Dinan and then went up to Mont St. Michel and on to Bayeux and Rouen. Good food, good times…
My husband tended to speed on the autobahns and autoroutes, but I was the one who got caught speeding (40 in a 35 zone more or less) in an alpine tunnel in Switzerland LOL – he never got caught…
Lapassionara
These are wonderful. The low tide at St. Malo reminds me of one of my favorite books, “All the Light We Cannot See,” in which the bombing of St. Malo in August, 1944 plays a central role.
YY_Sima Qian
These are 50 years old photos?! Damn! Very nice!
Barbara
Love the spider web, but they’re all lovely. It’s been 10 years since I was last there, but there were still places in France like the landscape scene you captured. Like U.S., France seems increasingly divided between urban and rural.
Ten Bears
Mont St. Michel showed up as a Windows backdrop recently and I had to chuckle, and here I chuckle again: some sixty years ago I walked that.
Betty
@Lapassionara: That was my immediate reaction too. I loved that book.
WaterGirl
Love this set of photos!
Okay, maybe not the one with the crucifix in the graveyard, as I am now having Catholic flashbacks, but I really love all the others!
Albatrossity
Gorgeous shots, per usual! Thanks for saving them all these years!
And yes, Lapassionara, that is a splendid book. If you ever get the chance to hear Tony Doerr read his work at a live event, do it. He is a witty and wonderful person as well as an amazing writer.
WaterGirl
I will also say that I especially enjoy it when you tell us stories with the pictures.
KSinMA
Beautiful photos. Thanks!
Yutsano
Dat Mont St Michel pic tho…
My parents are going to France at some point in the future. I should show my mom that picture. Maybe they’ll head up that way. It is close to where my very French* surname comes from.
*unless it’s very Dutch. Like most European backgrounds it’s complicated.
JustRuss
I had an acquaintance who grew up on a farm in Brittany. Got to spend a week on their farm, almost 40 years ago. Great experience.
Anonymous At Work
Did a tour with relatives of Normandy then heading back west, not Brittany headed east. So little time.
BUT, I do remember Mont. St. Michel and thinking that three old men with sharp sticks could hold off an army at the place and wondering how anyone could NOT build something on that island, even if it was the most screwed up fishing pier ever.
Denali
I visited Brittany in 2000 as a chaperone on a student exchange trip. I have always wanted to go back and visit some of the islands and Quimper and other places I did not see. I did get to Mont St. Michael, a lifelong dream, St. Malo, and Carnac- a standing stones site. I also would like to visit the artists colony where Van Gogh painted. So many places to see. Great photos!
SkyBluePink
What lovely photos!
munira
Great photos. I also love the spider web in particular.
Martin
Lovely. Wife and I are heading there in 2024. Gives me time to get my French in order.
oenofool
The monument in photo #6 is called a calvaire; this one is in the village of Pleyben. It was first sculpted in 1555, then modified up through the 1740s. It depicts 30 scenes from the life and passion of Christ. Monumental roadside calvaries like this one are found only in Brittany.
JR in WV
We spent a week or so in SE France on a tour of caves with ancient paintings of extinct in Europe animals. Obviously we saw a lot of rural France going to and fro those ancient sites, so I can say that as of just a few years ago there was plenty of quiet rural spaces in the Dordogne region and thereabouts. Your photos are great, thanks for sharing!
Fresh bread delivered to every household in a tiny village, daily.
Great food, even in tiny bars… Train service to every village… why can’t we have those good things?
Oh, yeah, because of Republican fascists and capitalism allowed to rape the citizenry, that’s why we can’t have the good things.
oldster
Memories of a trip to Normandy many years ago:
Le Mont St. Michel is one of the magic places of the earth.
The wreckage of D-Day is omnipresent — my son was able to crawl into a Sherman at the Falaise site.
The dairy products are sublime — ordinary butter in that area is more delicious than any Brie you will eat in the US.
currawong
I love Brittany. I first went there on a school trip when I was 14 and we stayed near St Malo. We’ve holidayed there several times since, most recently in 1992, a few years before we moved to Australia.
We stayed in a gite (best way to see France, and cheap too) near the town of Josselin and my son who was just turning one started to walk (well run really) and we had to rush out and buy him some shoes.
currawong
@oldster: I’ve never really understood why French butter tastes much better than butter from anywhere else in the world.