Rennes....

Welcome to Rennes. Pronounced "Ren" by the locals; like the bird Wren.

Our hostel, overlooking Canal St Martin, is only a few hundred metres from the centre of the old city.

Rennes is a very old city. The old city has a medieval cobweb of narrow streets and lanes opening onto irregular squares. The streets, lanes and squares are mostly cobbled. In spite of their narrowness of the streets pedestrians must share with cars and motorbikes.

In Rennes anything built since the mid 1700s is considered modern. That is because in 1720 a carpenter accidently caused a fire that burned a lot of the city down.

These buildings in the photo below are typical of the buildings pre the fire.

The "modern" buildings built after the fire where built in the original style.

The buildings seem to have been built higgledy-piggledy. Often leaning at alarming angles. But have stood the test of time.

Rennes was from the middle ages, and I guess you could say still is, the capital of the Brittany. Brittany was it's own kingdom until the Duchess Anne married the King of France. During some of it's time Brittany has been part of Britain and sometimes France. Brittany was the centre of the 100 year war between the British and the French. The Parliament of Brittany building has been recently restored to its former glory after a fire in 2002.

Rennes is a very big University town. A bit like Cambridge or Oxford it has the colleges of the university integrated into the city centre. Needless to say the place is full of students living the student lifestyle even though the Uni is on holidays. There is a real vibe to the city centre influenced by the student and artist heartbeat of the place. There is some interesting sculptures around the city streets.

Each era in Rennes has bought with it new architectural styles to match it power and influence.

The local swimming pool built in 1925 is a masterpiece of ceramic and mosaic decoration.

We spent several days wandering the streets of Rennes until we were too worn out to go any further.

Further relaxing was conducted wandering around the Rennes City Gardens.

Rennes other claim to fame is that it has the second largest market in France held each Saturday.

It covers an area of about 10 acres, some indoor and some outside. Needless to say we had a great time looking, tasting and buying. Here are some photos to of what is on offer.

Undercover stalls:

The Cheese Stall

The Butcher

The Baker...

and the goodies purchased, which were seriously yummy.

Outdoor Stalls:

The Garlic Grower


The Artichoke Grower

The Roast Chicken Truck

One corner of the market is devoted to flowers.

The Drive...

Well today’s the day. It has finally arrived. John's first go at driving a left hand drive car on the right hand side of road. Hold on tight!Collecting the car from Citroen could not have been easier or faster. Thankfully the assistant switched the onboard language to English. The car has a mini-operating systems for its user defined settings. Then the built in navigation system has a multi-multi level menu driven system which is not very intuitive (maybe it is just French) which is controlled by a multifunction joystick and cursor keys. The car a Citroen C3 Picasso and it has just 10km on the clock.

Picasso...

Needless to say the pilot and co-pilot are a wee bit nervous to say the least. The rest of the Paris traffic was blissfully unaware what was about to be unleashed on them. Our fist stop is only a kilometre down the road to fill up with fuel. Like all new cars the fuel tank is empty. With two GPS and a mud map to guide us through the 3 roundabouts and several turns in just one and a bit kilometres we manage to arrive without incident. This must be the only servo within cooee of Charles de Gaul (CDG) airport. Every pump is filling up a taxi, limo or a hire car. The servo and the space around it looks more like a car park than a petrol stop. And on top of that the drivers roar around and through the service station like maniacs with only centimetres to spare and a bit of tooting. Picasso is diesel. But it is not always called diesel and petrol is definitely not called petrol (sans plomb or something or other). To add to the confusion at this service station there seemed to be two grades of diesel. John figures the one with the advertising attached is probably the more expensive of the two.

The Death Grip…

With a tank of full of fuel, empty bladders and the sunroof open we hit the open road. It is 375km west across France to our destination at Rennes. The roads around the airport are just a gigantic spaghetti junction. We blindly follow the GPSes directions which thankfully agree with each other and more importantly agree with the co-pilot’s road map plotted route (highlighted with yellow marker pen).

The GPS setup…

By now it is 9.30am on a work day in Paris and the roads are full to overflowing. We spend an hour or so getting from CDG and around the perimeter of Paris from the north-east to the south-east. Just as we see light at the end of the tunnel, we discover the exit we had planned to take onto the motorway to Rennes is closed for major reconstruction. Luckily the 3 navigators have time in the crawling traffic to come up with another plan they all agree on.We finally hit the open road. The motorway is eight lanes wide and has a 130km/hr speed limit.

The Open Road….

The French drivers seem to think this is the minimum speed not the maximum limit.

John gets into the spirit…

Jenelle changes role from chief navigator to chief co-driver. John finds it a bit tricky getting the hang of where to position the unfamiliar car in the lane when the steering wheel is on the unfamiliar other side of the car. This lane positioning is more problematic when we are passing on the left, judging the distance between us and them. On top of that John seems to have developed some difficulty in keeping under a 130 km/hr (and still the locals go by like we are standing still).

In between giving necessary advice on how fast and where to drive, Jenelle has a chance to get some nice shots of the French countryside as we hoon along.

French countryside...

We are amazed by the vast area of wheat growing in fields that seem to stretch to the horizon in places.

Fields of Wheat….

We arrive in Rennes at the Youth Hostel early afternoon. The drive has been successfully completed. Yahoo!!! Time to relax with a drink and watch the boats on the canal from our bedroom window.

St Martin Canal….

Paris

We have to two days to rediscover the Paris we have known from the past. With no set plans but just to wander and visit an old friend.

We spend our first day wandering around Montmartre. Sacre Coeur is just as splendid as usual with it's beautiful white domes standing out on the Paris skyline. We can even see it from our hotel room half and hour away near CHG Airport.

We went to see the Artist's market and watch them paint. It is amazing to see so much talent and variety. The Artists that are doing Portraits as people walk around are very interesting to watch.



It is so full of tourists that we soon head to the quieter streets and just walk and enjoy being in Paris. We had two excellent espresso coffees so as to use the toilets which we forgot are few and far between. You don't have to go far to pay what locals pay as we had two coffee's for less than one up where the tourists are.

This part of Paris is full of steps and you are either going up or down.



We just had to have a try of some cakes in the window this is what traveling is all about...watch our waist line.



Because we are just going up and down streets at random we discover areas with different characters. Just beside Montmartre is an area dominated by African immigrants. Weddings must be their thing because there is shop after shop dedicated to wedding clothes. In one window along with the wedding dresses there was a self rocking cribb for the baby of the bride we guess!





The general buildings in the are are very impressive.


Here is a building with louvers on the end that show a face when viewed from the right angle.


We even bump into one of the original old gates to the city, Porte St Denis.



After returning to our hotel at Roissy, we take another walk to discover some of the cute village where we have dinner each night. Tonight it is Pizza. It is already decided that tomorrow it will be Crepes.





Our second day takes us back into town and to the Latin Quarter. We re-walk these lanes and streets around the Sorbonne University and the Pantheon. This is area is full of students and stores that students need. Art shops and Crêperies and all types of national food restaurants are here.




We also walk along the Seine as you can never be tied of doing that.




It takes us a long time to rediscover Shakespeare Bookshop. It is a English bookshop (mainly used books) and is also a great resource for information (in English) for what is going on in town, places to live, places to eat etc.

In amongst the old neighbourhood springs up new super modern building like this new Hotel built by the Arabs.

To Paris on the A380....

The highlight of our trip from our cottage near Brighton to Paris was a ride in the new A380 Airbus.

The A380 is a double-decker that carries almost 600 people including crew. It is a lot fatter than a jumbo to accommodate the double-decker configuration. Its gigantic, its quiet and its fast.

The interior is similar to a normal Jumbo with 10 seats across.

The best feature is that it has tail-cam, nose-cam and belly-cam. You can select each camera to watch the flight as you like on your personal seat back audio-visual display. Amazingly scary and enthralling at the same time.

Here is a shot from tail-cam on approach to CDG Paris airport.

Rottingdean & Goodwood House...

Our last full day in England. Our first stop is in the small seaside village of Rottingdean a few kilometres east of Brighton. The reason, an antiques fair. Rottingdean is very old and quaint village. We take a stroll around the village before the main event.

The Queen Victoria Pub...

Check out the vine growing all over this house.

The house is actually called the "Trellis House"

Before it was a holiday destination like Brighton, Rottingdean was a noted hideout for smugglers.

"Ye Olde Black Horse" the Smuggler's Pub....

This is were the naughty smugglers were sent to be whipped.

Rudyard Kipling lived in Rottingdean for a few years and built a large walled garden. The house has been sold but the garden is well maintained by the town council.

The co-pilot in the garden......

High on the hill overlooking Rottingdean is the old windmill.

The much vaunted antiques fair turns out to be a fizzer with about 10 stalls in one small room of the pub. Afterwards we get up close to the white cliffs at Rottingdean which are just like the famed cliffs of Dover.

Despite the chalky nature of the cliffs, what appears to be so sort of Heather grows well on it face.

The last place on our to do list is Goodwood House. Again a grand old house like Petworth but this time still is the Baronial Home of the Dukes of Richmond. The son and heir, the Earl of March and his family live in the house. His father the Duke is retired to a “smaller” house on the Estate.

Goodwood House.....

The family have turned the 12,000 acre Estate in a thriving business based on horse racing, fast cars (it is the home of the Festival of Speed held each June), air shows at it's own airport and have created a leisure and party resort destination.It was very famous for hosting social parties and still is.

Cricket has been played at Goodwood since 1774.

The stories those trees could tell.....

We travel home though Petworth along to A272 as we did yesterday. This time because we are familiar with the road we relax and do really enjoy the drive. In an open top sports car or motor bike the drive would be quite exhilarating. We even manage to stop at a lookout to get some photos of the countryside.

Petworth House...

We decide head over to visit Petworth House for no other reason than with our National Trust membership, entry into the house is free. (Oh, and there just happen to be a big car boot sale along the way.) We had visited Petworth House a few years ago, but our memories of it were a bit foggy, so we thought “what the heck”.

From the cottage to Petworth along the A272 is about 100km and is supposedly one of the ten best drives in Britain according to Guardian Newspaper's Travel Section. The drive is ok, but like most the drives we have taken in this part of the country you can't see anything of the scenery, due to the unending hedges that line both sides of the road. We were able to get a lucky photo through a break in the trees of the surrounding rolling downs.

Rolling downs typical of the Sussex countryside...

Petworth House is one of those grand old homes built by generations of Dukes of Something-or-other over centuries. But due to high maintenance costs, falling family wealth and the dreaded death duties the family's can no longer afford to keep the houses. Often the houses are donated to the National Trust which is then responsible for the maintenance and management of the property (often with the former owners as tenants, in one small corner of the house).

On the way we fail to find the mythical car boot sale but do find a flower show in a country church. The flower displays are lovely, the coffee and cake afterwards are great and the warm hospitality of the locals is wonderful. Unfortunately country churches are going the way of the grand old homes due declining numbers of parishioners and rising costs. Flower shows and the like are a small way of raising money to support the parish.

Flower display...

Fighting through the traffic we finally arrive at Petworth House. We spend an hour or so wandering through the house on a self guided tour concentrating on the art work. A lot of the work is by the old masters of the 17^th and 18^th century.

After the tour we head into the village of Petworth, which is just outside the gates of the house. The village is wall to wall antiques shops. Real expensive high class stuff. A bit out of our league.

The village itself however is very cute.

Wisteria covering a house in Petworth Village....

The main road A272 runs right through the middle of town and today it is nearly nose to tail.

Sports Car in Village...

Petworth House is surrounded by it's original gardens/park, much of which was designed and planted by the great Lancelot 'Capability' Brown over 250 years ago. A lot of the trees are enormous.

Tree Hugger........