I LOVE THE BRETON COAST

One of the main things I want achieve when in Brittany is to walk the length of the Sentier des Douaniers - have I mentioned it before? The coastal path. And its going to take a very long time as both our bites at the cherry this time were very short. Both times because of lunch. 

The first outing was supposed to connect to the start of our previous walk (back in May) when we'd done a stretch eastwards from the Chateau Suscino, the plan this time was to walk to Suscino (and back) from St.Gildas de Rhuys. Firstly this went pear shaped as St.Gildas village itself isn't on the coast, as in you don't reach the town, see a signpost for the port and promptly come to the edge of the land. We arrived to find a busy town centre - on a Sunday morning? as there was an antique fair on, in the car we snaked around the little roads and eventually (on the verge of giving up) found the sea. Off we set - beautiful and surprising, that would sum it up, due to the large swathes of red seaweed, really quite vibrant and very unusual.

The photograph doesn't do it justice.

It was a delightful walk in and out of coves each filled with the seaweed, and with interesting viewpoints along the way, the first guide etched in rock - see below at the cross, the second panorama at the little harbour where we had to end the walk because it was lunchtime.

Hey ho, the joys and annoyance of French lunchtime! We'd only walked say 4km, but if we didn't head into the town at this point we wouldn't be having anything to eat until dinner at home. French restaurants are still strict in their adherence to eating between 12 and 2, we got in at 1.25 and the next arrivals 10 minutes later were given the 'desole shrug' i.e. sorry, the chefs had enough. In an ideal world after lunch I would have liked to do another short jaunt to the north of St.Gildas, but in the distance from the restaurant back to the beach car park where we'd started my eyes were streaming, the sun was loosing a battle with the clouds and the wind was coming sideways with a good scattering of sand in it. So we chickened out, that was walking for today.

St.Gildas itself seems a nice spot, we were surprised to discover we'd never been there before - all coastal villages become a bit of a blur and only after you arrive you say - 'ah, yeah, I remember here'.

It's quite an arty little place, there was a good amateur exposition in progress in a couple of salles, but the 3 or 4 galleries we spotted were of course closed - Sunday/out of season. Therefore worth a return visit, which is inevitable as we have to pick up the sentier again and try to achieve this goal of walking the coast of Brittany, although in chunks this size I will have to live to be 100. 

By the way the restaurant was Le Casier and I wouldn't recommend it (Review on Trip Advisor)