It was sad to leave Le Mont-Saint-Michel because it marked the end of our driving trip and really the start of a rather convoluted journey home. Only about 60km to Rennes where we returned the rental car, and spent the night at the Saint-Antoine hotel again, so we could catch the TGV back to Paris the next day.
Our entire almost four week drive around Brittany was only 1625km in our rented hybrid Corolla, a mere 63km/day. We topped it up with E10 sans plomb twice during the trip, and again coming back into Rennes. Petrol stations are mostly "pay at the pump" and easy to use. Once we were on the coast, we were mostly on country roads (Departmental D roads) which wind through the centre-ville of dozens of interesting small towns. These towns were nevr meant for motorised traffic! Other times we were on higher grade National N roads which were sometimes divided and tended to avoid towns. All the places we stayed at, and reported in this blog, are really quite close to each other, which is why our total mileage was not so great. For this trip, including insurance, Avis charged us EUR1768, or EUR68/day.
We never quite came to terms with the short 9 hour days in France. Where we were was close to due south from London, but an hour further east in time zones. Daylight never truly arrived until about 09:00, and sunset was about 18:00. Being dark outside meant we slept in almost every day, and had to rush to make it to breakfast (which usually closed at 10:00). In Paris and the bigger towns, it was evident that workers and early birds where up and fully active (in the dark) from about 06:00, but not much happened until daylight in the villages.
Counting Rennes, in our driving trip we stayed in 10 different hotels over 26 days, some modest, some luxurious; some spacious rooms, some very tight; some modern, some very old; some busy, some virtually empty; but in all of them we had clean sheets and hot water. We loved the common heated towel rails some of which were powerful enough to heat the whole bathroom and dry our washing. At every place, we enjoyed a pleasant reception with competent English (which was just as well) and they all provided breakfast, mostly for a fee - in some towns, this was our main meal of the day, so difficult was it to get fed. We bought a baguette and cheese at local markets for lunch. Most of the hotels had cable TV, and we were often able to get BBC, CNN and the English language France24 channel, so we were able to keep up with novel coronavirus, Australian bushfires and floods (and tennis), Trump's impeachment trial farce, Boris' Brexit, the weather and the state of the strikes in Paris. All hotels offered free WiFi, it even worked in most of them. Car parking was always a great unknown, but we managed it everywhere without great drama, sometimes 200m up the street.
The Lightroom map shows where we have been by the number of photographs taken. We think we have covered Brittany, but really, we've only done the coast with a strong emphasis on Belle-Ile-En-Mer, the Saint-Malo + Mont-Saint-Michel area, and the three peninsulas of the far west coast. There's a lot of Brittany we have neglected.
