Well, small break, but it did the job. Two and a half days at the seaside in the shape of the sprawling and fascinating city of Saint-Nazaire which was bombed to bits in the Second World War. We have friends there so we did a house swap - rambling 1860s house with attached wilderness for an ingeniously renovated 50s terraced house with small garden and terrace.
St Nazaire docks and cruise ship being constructed
Just love a good French road name....
We explored the city on foot - not as much as we normally would the temperature being around 35 degrees - thankfully plunged into the sea several times and visited various coastal towns such as La Turballe, and the ridiculously pretty, Piriac-sur-Mer, and picnicked in a place called Le Rat . . . Actually, that was the place of my now logged 'best butter experience'. My 'best cup of tea experience' was in a National Trust tearoom in Corfe Castle, and this was the butter one . . . a paper-wrapped small round of butter from a local producer which went with the platter of cheese we had bought from St Nazaire market. Butter, not local producer. Maybe it was the sun-warmed wall we were sitting on following a swim, or the sense of freedom from jobs to be done, or the knowledge that we might eat something equally delicious in the evening . . . nope, it was that pat of butter.
Anyway, I digress. No I don't, back onto the food subject . . . I had wanted to find that 'perfect fish dish whilst sitting in beach restaurant with chilled glass of white wine' experience, the reality was a nice cheese-filled 'crepe' sitting in an over populated café without sea view but it was perfectly fine - especially the chilled glass of IPA.
The following day featured more coastal exploration, swimming, and salt-buying from a lone salt producer in his small van. I asked how the year had been and he said catastrophic - too much rain and not enough heat; the salt pans not drying out and thus no lovely crystal salty residues. We bought several bags which were part of the harvest from two years ago; he mentioned wryly that some people expect it to have gone off after a year - eet is a natural preserving agent! quelle idiots!
My food dream still wasn't going to happen as we had failed to reserve anything and spent a couple of hours driving around the coast near St Brevin Les Pins increasingly desperately looking for, in the end, anything to eat . . . not MacDo - we do have a line to be drawn, quand meme! Eventually we found a beach cafe with a free table, sand underfoot, no fish as such but good tapas instead; the entertainment, a group of utterly pissed French guys who had obviously had been sitting there for a long time. I thought at first they were speaking in some rare North of France dialect where words are immensely strung out and mangled but no, just the effect of many mojitos, beers and a bottle of very expensive red wine that had just been presented by a tired but still-managing-to-smile waitress.
We enjoyed the tapas, paid and went to stand on the dusky beach looking at the silhouetted shapes of the little stilt-y fishing huts and the distant lights of the 24/7 ship (sadly, ridiculously huge cruise vessel) building at the St Nazaire port. A last few gull calls spiked the balmy air, along with the drunken baaahh-haaaing of the inebriated French party as they raised their glasses to a probably non-memorable evening in South Brittany.
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