After five months on the island of Ireland, it was finally time to make a major move! Time to leave the ease of being in English speaking countries (okay, so English is a loose term for some of the speaking we have heard) and have new adventures. Time for me to brush off my little bit of French and return to an area we fell in love with a couple of years ago: lovely, lovely Brittany. But we will get to that in a bit. First up, the journey –
Getting from Belfast to Rennes is probably pretty simple in the summer (people in the UK love to go to France), but not so simple in the fall. We had a couple of options (some of which included propeller planes — not my favorite) and none of which were speedy. It’s not very far to get from there to here, but it wasn’t going to be fast! We decided on an early morning flight out of Belfast to Amsterdam, then a flight from Amsterdam to Rennes – late afternoon!
We had Colin pick us up Friday evening at the house in Larne (We got to know Colin after he had driven us back and forth from the airport when we went to Germany over the summer). We stayed at the Maldron Hotel right at the airport, which had a surprisingly good restaurant! At 4:30 the next morning, we were walking out the hotel doors, across the path and into Belfast airport. Ugh. I am not an early morning person. Everything went smoothly from there and we were in the air to Amsterdam!
The flight was quick (about 70 minutes), uneventful (best kind of flight) and we had a great sunrise over Europe. Amsterdam. I was at the airport there on my first trip to Europe but had never gone into the city. Since we had such a long layover we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see at least a little bit! But first, Schiphol airport. If you aren’t familiar, this is one of the major European hub airports. The place is massive. And the shops!! Oh wow. Good thing I knew that we could not possibly carry anything more. And that is no joke. We had to buy a fourth suitcase in Larne. And then on Friday, I went back into town and bought a larger fourth suitcase! They all ended up being over 22kg too. Yikes. We will need to get this figured out before heading back to the US in December! Not sure what happened, or what grew. I don’t even have my industrial strength hair dryer. Anyway, back to Schiphol. We people are obviously not the only people to take advantage of a long layover as the luggage drop area is very well set up! We left all of our stuff there, hopped in a Tesla taxi (yes!), and headed into the old city center. Yes, I know the train is much cheaper and very convenient, but we had a limited amount of time and didn’t want to waste any of it.
First stop was some breakfast (found a super cute little place called Pluk. Highly recommend it, but I couldn’t tell you where it was, other than near a canal), then we wandered our way over to the Anne Frank house. As we were walking there, I swear my head was on a swivel, trying to take everything in! Probably my favorite movie with a great chase scene through the canal area is The Hitman’s Bodyguard – the Husband and I kept saying “do you recognize that spot?”
The Anne Frank house. I wished now that I had taken a photo of the actual entrance to the house. It’s a new, modern building that probably has an excellent educational opportunity. And I really was planning to go in. But then, we saw the crowds. This was early October! There were swarms of people everywhere. Yuck. And again, we didn’t have a lot of time. So we walked to the front of the house and took a photo.
One thing about Amsterdam: it might not be legal to smoke weed on the streets, that doesn’t mean it isn’t everywhere!!! It would be a cheap way to get high I guess, just walk around and inhale. Since we didn’t want to show up at the airport glassy eyed, we did try to avoid it🤪
Sightseeing expedition complete, it was time to return to the airport. Honestly, at this point I was getting hardily sick of airports. But we soldiered on, retrieved our bags, got checked in (grateful to see that none of the checked bags had gained weight during their stay in the luggage check area, as the limit is 23 kg), went through security…and stayed there for a bit. We were all scrutinized. We have so much miscellaneous crap in our backpacks, security personnel were very interested in us. I even got the full pat down. Sigh. But, we were finally headed to France! Yay!
We were met at the airport by our wonderful driver, William. The drive isn’t too bad, about 50 minutes. By the time we arrived at the house, we had been traveling for 14 hours, only 2 hours and 20 minutes of it was flying time! It is so pretty once you’re out in the countryside. If you’re not familiar with French regions (departments), Brittany (Bretagne) is in the northwest part of the country. Normandy is the next northern region. Brittany is a huge agricultural and dairy producer for France. They also grow a lot of apples, although Normandy is more famous for their apples (Breton and Normandy ciders are fabulous!). The weather is a little warmer than the Pacific Northwest, but it is green and lush due to frequent rains. There is not as many evergreens here, so I’m guessing the hillsides will be gorgeous in about 2-3 weeks as the leaves change! Brittany was also mostly left alone in both world wars (except for the poor city of Brest on the far west coast. It was decimated), so it retains its old villages and ancient buildings. I will do a post soon on Dinan, but until then, here are a few photos –
