But, to return to our road trip that was now several weeks ago, Marcy and I headed to Saint Malo. We stayed at Le Nautilus, which was a great little hotel in a quiet part of the city. This city is famous because it is walled - literally there are walls all around the town itself that you have to drive/walk through to get into town. It was just about dark when we arrived and Marcy headed inside to ask where to park (yes, they spoke English). After just a little bump and a parallel parking challenge, our car was safe for the night and we checked in to our room. We must have been the last guests to arrive because the man at the desk didn't even ask our names, just gave us our keys.
After "freshening" up, we took off in search of dinner. Let me say, the food in this town was amazing and I could have stayed for days just eating and eating - crepes, mussels and seafood, salted caramel, chocolate, mmmmmm....
For dinner we chose a nice looking seafood place and we enjoyed a fish soup for our entree (appetizer) and mussels and fries for our plat (entree) and then some ice cream for dessert. The place was cool because it had some awesome quotes on the wall. My favorite was: "Alcohol may be man's enemy, but the bible says that we must love our enemies."
We didn't want the night to end, so headed to a pub we had seen when strolling the town for dinner earlier. I ordered a local beer and Marcy had a coffee with Bailey's (let me just say, this isn't a traditional French drink and we had to explain it to them) and we chatted with the bartender. He mapped out a running route for us the next morning and then we got chatting with some locals, most of whom didn't speak much English. They all thought we were younger than 30 (bingo!), except one jerk named Pierre, haha. And, I got complimented on my French by several of them (another bingo!).
The bar we were at specialized in macerated rums, so for our next drink, Marcy and I both chose a local concoction. They were strong, but interesting and pretty good - I had ginger lime and Marcy had something fruity.
The next morning, we dragged our butts out of bed to go for a run. It was so great to move a little since I hadn't worked out much since Marcy arrived. And, we ran most of the way either along the beach or the walls of the city, so it was a great way to view the town. After about 75 minutes, we negated our run by indulging in pastries (croissant aux amandes for me - almond croissant), then headed back to the hotel to shower and check-out by 11.
Unfortunately, the weather turned a bit and it rained most of the afternoon, but we walked around and shopped. And, Marcy learned how to ask "Est-ce que je peux gouter quelque chose?" (Can I taste something), so we spent a good amount of time sampling chocolate and cookies.
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| Atop the walls |
Lunch was crepes - we intended to have just one, but they looked so good that we both had dessert too, along with a cup of local cidre.
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| Buckwheat crepe with chicken and spinach! |
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| Chocolate pear crepe |
I'll save you the details of the ride home, but will just say it is hard to fill up a gas tank in Paris at 10 pm if you don't have a damn credit card with a puce (chip) in it. This is the first time I've really felt frustrated about not having one, but I got over it!
For anyone looking for a great trip in France, I'd highly recommend both Mont-Saint-Michel and Saint Malo - the towns were beautiful and a definite change of scenery from the go-go-go of Paris.
More adventures to come...
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