Sunday 21st – Week 1 – Drive to Chinon via Rennes

Today we drove from Dinan in Brittany to Chinon in the Loire Valley, via Rennes. Since we reset Jane, she's had this annoying habit of making a bonging sound (you know bong, bong, bong) whenever my speed exceeds the published speed limit by more than 10kms per hour. She only bongs 3 times then stops, but it had got to be so regular that I had to pull over to the side of the road yesterday and reset her, so that she stopped her incessant bonging.

As we began our drive to Rennes today, Anne commented about 20 minutes into the trip that I was doing “123kph in a 110 zone”. I waited for a good minute before commenting “that was so much less offensive that Jane's bonging”. “Wasn't it” said Anne. Oh dear, I thought, that sarcasm went straight over her head. A minute later Anne said “oh, that was annoying, wasn't it”. Since then, we've had no more bonging and no more running commentaries, so all smooth sailing.

Also on the trip to Rennes, we past one of the pesky machines that tells you your current speed. As we approached it, it started flashing my speed, with the word around it “Trop Vite.. Levez La Pied” “Too fast, lift your foot”, which I thought was a rather gentle reminder about keeping within the speed limit.

We arrived at Rennes at about 10am, which is way too early for anything to be open in France on a Sunday. We parked by the town square and went for a walk around the town, past it's basilica, which was in good voice for the Sunday service, the opera house and the famous cathedral, which was ringing out a merry tune on the church bells calling people to service. We found a lovely square in the sun and sat down for a cup of coffee. As we hadn't had breakfast, we asked if he served croissants, which he replied “non”, then intimated that we should go to the boulangerie around the corner and bring them back to have with our coffees. This amazed us, because firstly he didn't serve food, and rather than buy it in, he was quite happy for people to sit in his courtyard and eat pastries from a brown paper bag bought round the corner. This is obviously the practice, as we've repeated the practice since then and it's all very accepted, which seems remarkably relaxed.

Rennes is mainly a university town, that seems to have more shoe shops per head of population than anywhere else I've been. Apart from being a bit scarfy and very shoppy, Rennes also seems to have a good drug trade going, as we noticed on several occasions the tell tale sign of a pair of sneakers hanging from an overhead power line. The one at the back of the church seemed particularly out of place.

After Rennes, it was back on the motorway and off to Chinon. We arrived in Chinon at about 3pm, via a trip to Saumur where we thought we would stay. We didn't, however, like the campground in Saumur, so have come further east to Chinon which has a much nicer campground (even as a 2-star, it was less Butlins like than Saumur – are we becoming campground snobs already??).

The notice on the door said the office was closed until 4pm, and just to find yourself a spot, get setup and come back to the office at 4pm. We duly returned at 4pm, got the site, organised a power adaptor to charge our batteries and then headed off to town to have a look around and eventually go to dinner.

June 21 is national music day in France and every small square was having a band of some sort playing music until all hours of the night. It is also, apparently, the night that the local motor cyclists come into town on mass (maybe it's every Sunday night) and parked on the river bank opposite the restaurant we were dining in, so we got to see a great variety of motor bikes and motor cyclists to while away the evening watching. As for the music, some of it was good, some of it was better appreciated from distance. Returning from dinner, the band at the bar down the road from the campground was belting out A”Eye of the Tiger”, which from a distance sounded passable. On closer inspection, however, it was anything but passable, so after a couple of truly dreadful renditions, we headed back to the campground and “appreciated” the music from a safe distance.