Brest, Quiberon, Quimper, Nantes, beaches of the coast, France, September 2014

Brest:  The four photos above are part of a single view.  The fortress at the top is monumental - just compare a car at the foot of it to the building. Going along the coast you can acquire a great feeling of the importance of the sea and ports in the great wars of the 16-19th centuries.  The fort and that tower look out over the huge modern port of Brest.  Towering over it is a monument from the U.S.honoring naval forces in the war.

Curiously, as I drove along the coast, I would see in the waving grass along the roads, concrete pill boxes still there from the German occupation of the coast.

Brest is not a stop on the tourist's list, but I like the history of it and enjoyed the city.

The coast south of Brest is both rough and pretty.  There are miles of beautiful, white sand beaches.  But I went into Quimper (pronounce Kemper), which is famous for its pottery, which seems to me to be nearly irrelevant today.

Quimper has quite a lot of half-timbered medieval buildings, the essential great cathedral, and quite a nice art gallery.  I am showing the photo of the river canal mainly because I was struck that nearly every city and town in western France is blessed with a clear and lovely stream, river or canal, of which they take wonderful care.  I think Toronto would do well to move one of its two rivers into town from both edges of the city - although we would never take the care of a river as the French do.

 I tried the beach. At Carnac.  It was so Cape Cod!  I took a four star hotel.  I told them their price was too high and they brought it down by 50%.  It was nice, although in truth they have pasted a modern front over an old fashioned bunch of rooms.  But they had nice new balconies, and really fancy modernized bathrooms, which included the only bidets I saw on this and the last trip through France.  They were really nice to me and the restaurant and bar on the front were home to (not many) very rich and sniffy people who clearly did not mind shocking prices for everything.

The oaring man (followed by spouse out of the image) is actually at Concarneau - nearby.  I admired their moxies just going out on the open ocean standing on a board with a single oar going nowhere as far as I could tell, using a great deal of energy.  I would love to do that naked but I would certainly have a life jacket nearby.

There is a long, pencil thin isthmus probably 10 miles long,running staright out to sea and ending not too far from three  sparsely inhabited islands.  This makes the peninsula a wonderful and beloved vacation spot.  There are many activities take place out there including digging mussels and other shell fish, and every kind of sea and beach activity.  Cycling is taken as though they are all Tour de France champs, although their rides must be the flattest surfaces on earth and although incontestably fun and fast, not as challenging as they pretend.

There were at least 50 of these kites in the sky just on this beach when I was there.  Most are used to pull along stand-up sailing boards, but the ones shown were just playing from the beachand shallow water.

But, I cannot figure out what to do on a beach at 71 years of age.  I did walk in the sea which was warm and had many people swimming.  Still, there was no chance I could sit there and stare at the waves and keep averting my view from the late mid-aged ladies who paraded by topless illustrating exactly what so obsessed Joan Rivers about parts of  the bodies of women at that age.