Southern Light in Brittany

We landed in Auray to start, for several days on the south coast. It's a popular area of sandy beaches, low tides that go way out, sunshine, and southern light.

The village of St Gustan is just across 17th-century bridge from Auray, good for ridiculously charming views.

Inland, you roll through agricultural fields and woodlands, very, very pretty. Did I mention pretty?

Just about every little town has a nice central "place" and a church that's worth a little pause.

It's a spider-webby network of roads so you are constantly sniffing out your route, or refiguring it, sometimes reliably, sometimes not so much. You pay a lot of attention to arrays of signs at intersections and roundabouts, keeping in mind the names of any villages that might be in the direction you want to go.

And you check your map a lot. It's generally not a bad place to have to stop by the road, though.

We rode upstream along the Blavet River for a couple of hours. Finding it on the map we imagined it would be a paved levee path like what we've ridden in Belgium, but it is as much dirt and packed gravel as pavement and lightly used by dog walkers and fishermen.

Most of the locks, which are also small electricity stations, have clearly devoted gardeners.

We had a big day going around the Golfe du Morbihan, not a terribly long ride, but in making a meal of the views and side roads we spent some six or seven hours on the road. We started in the upper left of the area marked picked out by the red circle on this map; the handwritten note is our ferry ticket to cross the gap at about 8 o'clock in the loop:

The road ends just short of here:

So we got on the ferry.

No one batted an eye at bringing the bikes onboard.

Or at this dog, who spent his time officiously checking out the sights and scents all over the boat:

On any ride in this area there's plenty of water to look at and over, of course.

The tides are huge; this mud will be underwater again in a few hours:

Riding means refueling, and we've had outstanding luck (and France is great place for such luck) in dropping into places along our routes and getting wonderful food. Of course we had to stop here:

Note the pre-lunch line for baguettes the boulangerie behind Harlan; it moved quickly and steadily--don't get the bread earlier in the morning or it simply won't be fresh enough. We made do with a couple of apple tarts in that beautiful box.

Back in Auray we went straight to lunch, where Harlan had slugs on his galette.

OK, no, they were scallops, "intact" I guess. And delicious.