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Brittany and Normandy: France's Northern Coast

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After about a month and a half of being inland, we finally got our first "beach days" of the summer during the last stretch of our bike tour!  Granted, beach days in Brittany and Normandy, the two regions lining the English Channel, are not quite occasions for tanning or catching some surf.  Just remember that England is right across the water, and you'll have an idea of typical summer weather on France's northwestern coast:  cool (like 60 F), windy, and frequently drizzly. Nonetheless, we were incredibly excited to arrive first at Saint-Malo, located in Brittany.  As I said in our previous post, we had been longing to visit St-Malo since finishing All the Light We Cannot See, so we were itching to explore the old walled city!  Our campground was a few miles east of St-Malo, situated between two private beaches.  It was pretty exquisite to see the sea from the comfort of our tent site!  After settling in, we took the bus back to the city and explored...

Close Encounters of the French Kind

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Bonjour from the train station in Rennes, in the Bretagne (Brittany) region of northwestern France!  (This is Caitlin, by the way, even though it says Adam is the author).  Where we last left off, we were chilling in our Tours AirBnB, trying to plan out the rest of our trip... and now we have a plan!  We are heading to Saint-Malo today, which is where a magnificent novel that we just read ( All The Light We Cannot See ; I can't recommend it highly enough!) mostly took place.  I am so excited to be by the sea for a while!  We will spend a few nights there and then bike to Mont-Saint-Michel, the famous tide-surrounded abbey that I have wanted to visit ever since I was little and my mom told me about it!  From there, we will bike to the Normandy coast, where we will explore the D-Day beaches and war memorials.  Finally, we will take the train back to Paris for our return to the US :-( Our past few days have been marked by incredibly generous, fun, and w...

Where are we now?

Legend

  • Red = We're going to bike that
  • Purple = We're biking that now
  • Grey = We biked that!
  • Black = We decided not to go that way
  • Yellow = We took a train
  • Magenta = We took a plane