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[Vacation]: France - Normandy and Brittany Part 2
Hello!~ 
First of all, thank you so much for all your nice comments to my last entry.
I'm glad you enjoyed the photos.
Meanwhile it seems Normandy and Brittany have been declared risk regions by RKI.
We ended day 5 in foggy Roscoff and started day 6 with the calvary of St. Thegonnec.
The calvary pictured above was very detailed and thus quite impressive.
It was mostly foggy that day, so the drops from the fog made the spider web more visible. And again lots of hydrangea everywhere! :)
I couldn't find a spider there, maybe it has left its wet web behind...
But I found one later that day. ^^; ...
This lady needs no introduction, I guess. :)
Next stop was the village Meneham famous for it's crystal blue ocean and stunning rock formations.
You could actually climb up the rocks near that small house for a better view ....
.. but this was clearly a case of expectation vs reality ... FAIL! ^^; ....
You can kind of tell how awesome this must look in good weather, though. :)
After that we went back to Roscoff to spend another night there. Unfortunately it was still foggy, so I never really got to see Roscoff at all.
On day 7 the weather was better again while strolling around at Cape Pointe du Van.
I loved the color combinations there!!
We then moved on to Concarneu and visited Ville Close.
There was a castle nearby (30 mins one-way), but it was hot and it would have been a close call to rush there, so I opted for chilling out at the walls of Ville Close and just enjoyed the stunning view from there.
Later I went down to the small private beach to collect a few shells. :)
Later that day we hit the art village Pont-Aven. A really lovely tiny town.
Loved the colors of the windows in the chapel there.
The occasional crepe + cafe au lait ... ;)
Day 8 started with good weather as well and ....
... lots of megaliths. And I mean LOTS of them. Like a thousand and more. :)
This was in Carnac.
We then drove down to the peninsula Quiberon.
Stunning rock formations and usually a very rough sea with strong waves (not when we visited), so also great for hiking around a bit!
I wish we had more time there!
We checked out another huge megalith at Locmariaquer that actually dropped and split as you can see. Quite impressive, though! ...
In the evening we spent some time in Auray where also our hotel was located.
It was raining so not everybody of the group joined us.
I'm glad I went because the view onto the cute port of Auray was all worth it!
There was also this stone bridge you had to cross to get to the port and it was calming to just observe the current changing.
While the others met up to return to the hotel, I decided to stay a bit longer for some souvenir shopping and enjoyed some crepes and cafe au lait.
The cafe was so cute!
I was sitting outside, but inside it looked like this.
They have the best view, huh? ;)
On my way back to the hotel I ran into this pretty cool street art.
On day 9 it was raining really hard when we arrived at Vannes.
So, quite a few people decided to stay in the bus ....
Vannes ramparts. On the left you can see an emblem with an ermine.
This was used as laundry back in the days.
Unfortunately the rain kept getting stronger. So strong that we were stuck for a while.
We then rushed back to the bus, but on the way back I found a Kusmi Tea shop and just had to buy something.
One of my co-workers is French and he sometimes brought that tea to work. I really liked it. :)
We moved on to Josselin with its beautiful castle. Luckily the rain stopped then.
It's a really lovely small town.
When you climb up towards to castle you'll run into many cute timbered houses. There's also a nice chapel.
Took the time to take some photos of wet flowers. :) The one on the right was amazing. I have no idea what kind of flower that is, though!!
Our last stop was Rennes. You can see a few of the group members in this photo.
Rennes already had quite high numbers of infections when we went there, but wasn't yet a declared risk region.
I was shocked to see that people wear masks outside, but where it really matters they took off their masks and had zero distance to each other ....
Rennes is full of university students and I guess they just don't care and keep hanging out together. *shrugs*
We only have 1.5 h to explore before we had our final dinner together.
Given the short amount of time we had there, I can't really say I liked Rennes that much. A typical big city ....
The historic center with timbered houses was nice, though.
There were quite a lot of Asian related shops. Some anime and manga related shops, I also found a K-Pop dedicated shop. :) .....
And I think I found myself a new car!! XD ..........
Last but not least let me show you a bit of the food I ate while in France:
Needless to say that I tried a fair share of crepes and galettes.
Ever since the series "Reign" I became a huge fan of Mary Stuart. She actually went to Roscoff and now they have a creperie with her name there.
I just HAD to eat there! The food was delicious. Got one with the famous Roscoff onions. ;)
Croissants, baguette .... if you want to eat healthy, even more if you want to eat gluten-free ... France is not the right country for you. ^^;
Another unhealthy, but quite yummie one is Kouign Amann. I only really like the savory ones, though. ;)
Besides the raw oysters I showed in the last entry, I also tried mussles mariniere and liked it quite a bit. :D
Again, you can see the entire trip from day 6 - 10 here (*click to enlarge):
Just like day 1, day 10 was used for travelling solely. In the late morning hours we all took the TGV back to the airport in Paris and then most of us took their respective flights back home, some even went home by train. We said our goodbyes and that was it.
Just like with arriving I had a really bad connection when leaving. When I arrived I had to wait for several hours at the airport. This time again, I had over 5h until my flight would leave.
I got me some Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks and continued sorting my photos, waiting for the counter of my airline to open so I could drop my baggage.
Once I had done that, went through security and strolled around some more, checking out some typical French souvenirs. ;P
When I finally arrived at the airport in Germany, they forced us to do a Covid-19 test and told us to go straight into quarantine.
I mean.. I would have done a test voluntarily anyway, but I was really annoyed that we were FORCED to do one as we didn't come from a risk region.
A co-worker of mine had just returned from Vienna the same day, a risk region. He was NOT forced to do a test. Only that he arrived by train and I by airplane. Find the mistake here .....
It was stressing me out so much. It was already quite late on Sunday, all supermarkets at the airport had closed, I didn't find my luggage, people were ordering me around and then I got that test stick shoved into my throat. It really hurt. :/
When I finally wobbled towards the train station there were a LOT of police officers with barking dogs which really made me anxious ....
Then, when I finally boarded the train they came to check our tickets. A man not sitting too far from me took off his mask for a few seconds because just like me he had his ticket on his phone and needed to face-unlock his phone.
They told him off so badly for taking off his mask for a few seconds, I really thought the world has gone crazy .... WTH? .....
Luckily I found a co-worker who was nice enough to buy me some fresh fruit and veggies and put it in front of my door the next day.
I had to wait a few days until I got my result. Naturally, it was negative as I hadn't been to a risk region anyway. If I caught the virus at all, then in the TGV or in the plane back from Paris to Germany and a test just a few hours later would naturally be negative. It's so stupid!
That's why they'll change the law in Germany starting from October!
Then you will have to go to quarantine for 5 days and only THEN do a test and wait for the results. Of course, it means if I go on vacation in October and the region becomes a risk region, I'm trapped in quarantine for quite a while.
That is not too bad as I can work from home and also get someone to do grocery shopping for me, but I'd go insane in my dark basement apartment. T_T .....
All in all it was a good vacation and I'm glad I got to go, but it was far too expensive for what I got out of it, especially because I had to skip Paris and had to opt for an extremely expensive flight due to Covid-19 .....
But yeah ... at least I got to go and I guess that's all that counts. :)
The travel agency already got a complaint from me though. First of all because of meeting at the airport "in the morning" without a proper time frame given. And then, because they told us it wouldn't be a problem AT ALL. We're not in any risk region, so we will not have to worry about quarantine etc. .... my ass! They lied to us! If I had known that before, I could have gone to Paris after all ... not sure if I would have, but at least I could have.....
I still have 20 days of vacation left for 2020 and not much time left. I'm trying to go somewhere in October, but need to decide spontaneously seeing that more and more countries are becoming risk regions again already and next month it will be even worse. :(
But as I need to get rid of the vacation anyway, I want to go somewhere ... and here in Germany it already started snowing yesterday, so it's certainly no travel weather anymore. :(
I hope you enjoyed this part 2 as well.
Have you travelled anywhere this year?
Bye~chuu!
First of all, thank you so much for all your nice comments to my last entry.
I'm glad you enjoyed the photos.
Meanwhile it seems Normandy and Brittany have been declared risk regions by RKI.
We ended day 5 in foggy Roscoff and started day 6 with the calvary of St. Thegonnec.
The calvary pictured above was very detailed and thus quite impressive.
It was mostly foggy that day, so the drops from the fog made the spider web more visible. And again lots of hydrangea everywhere! :)
I couldn't find a spider there, maybe it has left its wet web behind...
But I found one later that day. ^^; ...
This lady needs no introduction, I guess. :)
Next stop was the village Meneham famous for it's crystal blue ocean and stunning rock formations.
You could actually climb up the rocks near that small house for a better view ....
.. but this was clearly a case of expectation vs reality ... FAIL! ^^; ....
You can kind of tell how awesome this must look in good weather, though. :)
After that we went back to Roscoff to spend another night there. Unfortunately it was still foggy, so I never really got to see Roscoff at all.
On day 7 the weather was better again while strolling around at Cape Pointe du Van.
I loved the color combinations there!!
We then moved on to Concarneu and visited Ville Close.
There was a castle nearby (30 mins one-way), but it was hot and it would have been a close call to rush there, so I opted for chilling out at the walls of Ville Close and just enjoyed the stunning view from there.
Later I went down to the small private beach to collect a few shells. :)
Later that day we hit the art village Pont-Aven. A really lovely tiny town.
Loved the colors of the windows in the chapel there.
The occasional crepe + cafe au lait ... ;)
Day 8 started with good weather as well and ....
... lots of megaliths. And I mean LOTS of them. Like a thousand and more. :)
This was in Carnac.
We then drove down to the peninsula Quiberon.
Stunning rock formations and usually a very rough sea with strong waves (not when we visited), so also great for hiking around a bit!
I wish we had more time there!
We checked out another huge megalith at Locmariaquer that actually dropped and split as you can see. Quite impressive, though! ...
In the evening we spent some time in Auray where also our hotel was located.
It was raining so not everybody of the group joined us.
I'm glad I went because the view onto the cute port of Auray was all worth it!
There was also this stone bridge you had to cross to get to the port and it was calming to just observe the current changing.
While the others met up to return to the hotel, I decided to stay a bit longer for some souvenir shopping and enjoyed some crepes and cafe au lait.
The cafe was so cute!
I was sitting outside, but inside it looked like this.
They have the best view, huh? ;)
On my way back to the hotel I ran into this pretty cool street art.
On day 9 it was raining really hard when we arrived at Vannes.
So, quite a few people decided to stay in the bus ....
Vannes ramparts. On the left you can see an emblem with an ermine.
This was used as laundry back in the days.
Unfortunately the rain kept getting stronger. So strong that we were stuck for a while.
We then rushed back to the bus, but on the way back I found a Kusmi Tea shop and just had to buy something.
One of my co-workers is French and he sometimes brought that tea to work. I really liked it. :)
We moved on to Josselin with its beautiful castle. Luckily the rain stopped then.
It's a really lovely small town.
When you climb up towards to castle you'll run into many cute timbered houses. There's also a nice chapel.
Took the time to take some photos of wet flowers. :) The one on the right was amazing. I have no idea what kind of flower that is, though!!
Our last stop was Rennes. You can see a few of the group members in this photo.
Rennes already had quite high numbers of infections when we went there, but wasn't yet a declared risk region.
I was shocked to see that people wear masks outside, but where it really matters they took off their masks and had zero distance to each other ....
Rennes is full of university students and I guess they just don't care and keep hanging out together. *shrugs*
We only have 1.5 h to explore before we had our final dinner together.
Given the short amount of time we had there, I can't really say I liked Rennes that much. A typical big city ....
The historic center with timbered houses was nice, though.
There were quite a lot of Asian related shops. Some anime and manga related shops, I also found a K-Pop dedicated shop. :) .....
And I think I found myself a new car!! XD ..........
Last but not least let me show you a bit of the food I ate while in France:
Needless to say that I tried a fair share of crepes and galettes.
Ever since the series "Reign" I became a huge fan of Mary Stuart. She actually went to Roscoff and now they have a creperie with her name there.
I just HAD to eat there! The food was delicious. Got one with the famous Roscoff onions. ;)
Croissants, baguette .... if you want to eat healthy, even more if you want to eat gluten-free ... France is not the right country for you. ^^;
Another unhealthy, but quite yummie one is Kouign Amann. I only really like the savory ones, though. ;)
Besides the raw oysters I showed in the last entry, I also tried mussles mariniere and liked it quite a bit. :D
Again, you can see the entire trip from day 6 - 10 here (*click to enlarge):
Just like day 1, day 10 was used for travelling solely. In the late morning hours we all took the TGV back to the airport in Paris and then most of us took their respective flights back home, some even went home by train. We said our goodbyes and that was it.
Just like with arriving I had a really bad connection when leaving. When I arrived I had to wait for several hours at the airport. This time again, I had over 5h until my flight would leave.
I got me some Pumpkin Spice Latte at Starbucks and continued sorting my photos, waiting for the counter of my airline to open so I could drop my baggage.
Once I had done that, went through security and strolled around some more, checking out some typical French souvenirs. ;P
When I finally arrived at the airport in Germany, they forced us to do a Covid-19 test and told us to go straight into quarantine.I mean.. I would have done a test voluntarily anyway, but I was really annoyed that we were FORCED to do one as we didn't come from a risk region.
A co-worker of mine had just returned from Vienna the same day, a risk region. He was NOT forced to do a test. Only that he arrived by train and I by airplane. Find the mistake here .....
It was stressing me out so much. It was already quite late on Sunday, all supermarkets at the airport had closed, I didn't find my luggage, people were ordering me around and then I got that test stick shoved into my throat. It really hurt. :/
When I finally wobbled towards the train station there were a LOT of police officers with barking dogs which really made me anxious ....
Then, when I finally boarded the train they came to check our tickets. A man not sitting too far from me took off his mask for a few seconds because just like me he had his ticket on his phone and needed to face-unlock his phone.
They told him off so badly for taking off his mask for a few seconds, I really thought the world has gone crazy .... WTH? .....
Luckily I found a co-worker who was nice enough to buy me some fresh fruit and veggies and put it in front of my door the next day.
I had to wait a few days until I got my result. Naturally, it was negative as I hadn't been to a risk region anyway. If I caught the virus at all, then in the TGV or in the plane back from Paris to Germany and a test just a few hours later would naturally be negative. It's so stupid!
That's why they'll change the law in Germany starting from October!
Then you will have to go to quarantine for 5 days and only THEN do a test and wait for the results. Of course, it means if I go on vacation in October and the region becomes a risk region, I'm trapped in quarantine for quite a while.
That is not too bad as I can work from home and also get someone to do grocery shopping for me, but I'd go insane in my dark basement apartment. T_T .....
All in all it was a good vacation and I'm glad I got to go, but it was far too expensive for what I got out of it, especially because I had to skip Paris and had to opt for an extremely expensive flight due to Covid-19 .....
But yeah ... at least I got to go and I guess that's all that counts. :)
The travel agency already got a complaint from me though. First of all because of meeting at the airport "in the morning" without a proper time frame given. And then, because they told us it wouldn't be a problem AT ALL. We're not in any risk region, so we will not have to worry about quarantine etc. .... my ass! They lied to us! If I had known that before, I could have gone to Paris after all ... not sure if I would have, but at least I could have.....
I still have 20 days of vacation left for 2020 and not much time left. I'm trying to go somewhere in October, but need to decide spontaneously seeing that more and more countries are becoming risk regions again already and next month it will be even worse. :(
But as I need to get rid of the vacation anyway, I want to go somewhere ... and here in Germany it already started snowing yesterday, so it's certainly no travel weather anymore. :(
I hope you enjoyed this part 2 as well.
Have you travelled anywhere this year?
Bye~chuu!
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It's cool that they had anime/manga shops. I didn't know K-pop shops were a thing.
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The moderator was like: "I have to polish my Korean skills for this..."
I was like: "Dude, that song was in Japanese, though." XD ............
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Hope next year we can travel more freely again, but I still have my doubts. :(
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Nein, ich bin dieses Jahr nicht verreist. Ein Trip nach Griechenland war zwar gebucht aber wir haben uns wegen der Covid-19-Gefahr dagegen entschieden zu verreisen.
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2021 vielleicht dann auch nur Ziele, von denen man auf mehreren Wegen wieder nach Hause kommen kann....
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Und man hat mir schon gesagt, dass im 4. Quartal Urlaub nicht so gern gesehen ist.... aber das alles mit ins neue Jahr zu nehmen ist bestimmt auch nicht gern gesehen. Keine Ahnung, vielleicht nehm ich bis Weihnachten jeden Montag frei oder so.
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Und innerhalb von Deutschland ein bißchen umherreisen? Oder fühlst du dich da noch nicht fit genug?
Ich schätze euch bezahlen sie den Urlaub auch nicht aus? Das würde es vielen dieses Jahr einfacher machen. :) .....
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Ja, das mit der Fitness ist halt auch die Frage. An manchen Tagen humpeln ich halt immer noch etwas.
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Ich glaub, da ist mir die Freizeit lieber. Ja, drei Tage zu Weihnachten hab ich schon eingeplant. Die kommen auf die 15 Tage noch drauf...
Die Fitness ist halt so ne Sache und weil ich mich nicht so 100% fühle, find ich zu Hause sein auch grad nicht so schlecht.
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Klar, wenn man nicht ganz so fit ist, dann ist das natürlich eine andere Sache. :) Ging mir ja genauso.
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I hope I get out in the first half of October (and can come back again), most likely Greece, maybe Portugal.
And then one week in November within Germany a city trip either by car or by train - if the weather allows.
Then I finally got rid of my vacation.
Unfortunately, my company doesn't pay for vacation we aren't able to take ... that would be the best option in these times .... ^^;
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That sounded like major suckitude with the forced covid test :/
The U.S. is a hot mess covid wise, so have done absolutely no travel at all this year, which really sucks. I'm missing the coastline and hiking like crazy -_-
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Well, it's not like I don't understand, but it just doesn't make any sense to force people to do the test when they weren't even in a risk region, while people who were aren't forced to do the test. WTH?
So, it hasn't calmed down at all over there, huh? :( Too bad. It really helps so much to get out for once. I mean ... my French vacation was way too short and yet it was just SOOOO good to finally get out there. Especially for me, because I haven't been ANYWHERE in over 2 years. ^^; ....
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Lovely report! Thanks for sharing your trip in photos. I loved visiting those places through your eyes, as usual.
I am sorry you have to go through quarantine after all. : (
I hope you find a nice place to spend those remaining holidays.
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Yes, I'm currently trying to find affordable flights, but they're all insanely expensive. Trying to scare off the last few remaining tourists? Not a good idea flight agencies!
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I imagine everything is expensive because it is risky for them and must reduce occupation? Maybe they charge you for the people they aren't supposed to accept... and then keep flights full anyway. I don't know. Wherever you go, please stay safe. I don't suppose you want to fall sick abroad... : (
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I really hope it doesn't get any worse as we're entering the colder season. *hugs*
Thanks, I'll try my best. :)
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Glad you enjoyed the oysters and the mussels. They are my favorites, particularly the oysters. Glad too that you had crepes. Though they are usually enjoyed with a bowl of cider, of course. In France, cafe au lait is considered just something to drink at breakfast.
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https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passiflora_edulis
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