France July 2014: Last Few Days

From Roscoff we headed inland one day to the rolling foothills of the Montagnes Noires (highest point 318 meters, 1,043 feet). First, of course, a stop at the patisserie for fuel. A torsade is nicely designed to fit in a jersey pocket.

We found another long voie verte, a tree-lined lane, but after a few miles, pretty as it was, we realized we were cut off from any wider view of the countryside.

If we'd stayed on that route, we'd have missed the tree goats.

And so many straw bales

Harlan got to meet one more up close and personal finally.

This area is especially thick with interwoven lanes and farm roads, so we spent a couple hours not entirely sure where we were. We don't do GPS on the bikes yet--we like the maps and enjoy a reason to talk to someone occasionally when we need directions--but we may add it to the mix next time. For planning and route finding we had 1) Google, 2) online "heat maps" of others' rides, which delineate the popular roads, 3) four paper maps, 4) two placemats from the hotel breakfast tables, featuring the tourist boards' high points, 5) directional signs on the roads, 6) town limit and farm locations signs. But aside from the biggest towns and main landmarks, there was surprisingly little overlap in the information given in all of these. Even road numbers, sparsely marked on the road, seem to vary with where you are and sometimes from the maps in hand.

With no deadline and no particular goal except to get back to our starting point, we didn't worry, but we did pause at one point to ask a mailman to confirm our location on our Michelin map. He studied it a long time, murmuring, "But I don't see this road..."

For lunch we found our way in an empty town to an empty restaurant next to a parish church.

The plat du jour was mutton stew, which we paired with a couple bottles of Coke--perfect!

Visitors explore this area to look at the "parish closes," churchyards that got a lot of investment in the 16th and 17th centuries when Brittany was especially wealthy. We rode by several of these but only took peeks at them while in our cycling shoes.

So we revisited some of these the next day when we drove south back to Auray.

Tourists aren't the only creatures who enjoy the art.

The array of sculpture is reminiscent of Chartres, smaller scale and in harder stone, tough to carve. Another Visitation (or is it a story from the Old Testament?) caught my eye, maybe 12 inches high.

There's also Noah with his family and the pairs of beasts in his ark.

God pulls Eve from Adam's rib into the Garden of Eden, surrounded by the brand new animals, featuring a lobster front and center.

A lion(?) bites down on a man.

Glancing at these buildings, you might assume they have a symmetry that maybe we take for granted in such buildings now. Then you become aware how uncentered things are.

Guimiliau has an enormous organ crammed into what's less an organ loft than a kind of deck or pier.

If you gaze at that picture above, you start to notice how the wall left of the organ isn't quite straight (anymore?). When you're there, you then become aware of how utterly uneven all the arches are. It's both cozy and handmade, and a bit unsettling.

The parish close in the town where we'd eaten our mutton stew the day before, Plouneour-Menez, is barer, starker.

Clearly each parish had or has widely different funds or budgets, whether originally or for maintenance or restoration I don't know. A couple of the others we saw have gloriously gilded, baroque altar pieces; Plouneour-Menez has a bare wall filled with stones and electrical cables hanging free in the corner.