A Paradocs Abroad

July 14th is the French National Holiday. I've always heard it called Bastille Day, but the French around here seem to just call it "Fête National".

[More:]

We celebrated with a bike ride. It started with the surprising realization that to do an 80 to 100 km ride (the distance we usually do around Richmond during the winter training season) we would have to pretty much circumnavigate the Pays d'Iroise region that we are living in. In other words, Pays d'Iroise containing a hundred or more small French towns and villages, and lots of farmland, is about the same size as almost completely urbanized Richmond, BC!

With our sense of scale appropriately adjusted, we headed west from the house in Saint-Renan that we are staying in to visit our local menhir, and carried on west to the Coast at Lampaul-Plouzarel. The wind was blowing 30-40 km/hr from the north-east, so the going was easy, but that would soon change.

We learned about cycling on Brittany on Paris-Brest-Paris in 2003. The road is never flat. You're always going either up or down, but neither for very long, so you never climb very high (100 to 300 m tops) but you sure accumulate elevation. Add a strong wind, and it's a serious training ride. If you're planning to ride PBP in 2007, start training now, ride lots of hills, and then ride some more hills. The closest thing I think that we have in southern BC to this terrain is Vancouver Island.

We turned north, into the wind, and passed, along the coast, through Lanildur, and Porspoder, an area littered with menhirs and other ancient stone arrangements. Fortunately, we were in a tourist area, so not everything was closed, as is typical on Sundays, holidays, and from 12:00 to 14:00 (more on that in another post...) We got a piece of apple cake and a softdrink at a patisserie in Porsponder. The hilly, windy challenge continued through Landunzez, Portsall, Ploudalmezeau, and Tréglonou to Plouvien.

Place names in this area are a mixture of French and Breton languages, and most of the signs have 2 spellings for each settlement. At Plouvien we turned south-west, toward home and got our reward for 45 km into the wind! Before the tailwind pushed us too fast, we stopped at the 15th century Chappelle Saint-Jouau where we learned that place names that start with "Plou" mean settlement or parish, and those that start with "Lan" mean monastery.

With the wind behind us we had a quick trip through Bourg-Blanc, past a large dairy plant to Milizac, and down a river valley into Saint-Renan.