Why Nantes?

...admittedly, not a great pun. But it was essentially how we decided to go visit Nantes: Cricket and Dave were sitting at home a couple days after Christmas looking at a map of France and Belgium, trying to decide if and where we should take a short trip during the kids' school vacation. Nantes is fairly close to Olivet and looked to be in an interesting place, near the mouth of the Loire River, which we've celebrated and studied, so we said "why not?".

Because the family rooms (rare in France) were full elsewhere, we stayed at the Holiday Inn in Nantes. We thought it was funny that when we pulled up in front of the hotel to check in and asked where we should park, the folks at the desk said just to leave the car right in front (that's our car in the picture, where it stayed for 2 days). This is fairly consistent with our general impression of parking in France; the operative rule seems to be "abandon your car wherever the heck you want". Perhaps we'll write a blog post on it later.

Anyway, Nantes turns out to be a great city to visit, with a fascinating history. The plaque in the picture, for instance, commemorates the Edict of Nantes. Nantes has a vibrant and fairly walkable centre ville, and there are trams that are easy to use, run frequently, and for which a 24-hour pass for four people costs about 4 euros (the same kind of thing in, say, Paris would run about 20 euros).

Speaking of prices, Nantes is noticeably less expensive than the France that we have become accustomed to. The plaque in the photo above is at the Chateau des ducs de Bretagne, whose courtyard and surrounding grounds, including access to the top of its surrounding wall that may be completely circumnavigated on foot and that gives great views of the city, are free and open to the public. If you want to visit the museum at the chateau, that will cost money, but the rates are about half of what you'd pay at other chateaus we've seen, and kids under 18 are free. One afternoon, we visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, and all four of us got in for only 7 euros. Nantes also has a good website, with an MP3 audio tour of the city, matching with a pedestrian route available at the tourist office, and marked on the sidewalks by blue arrow plaques near explanatory signs. We've linked you to the English version of the website. Just click on the the French flag if you'd rather read it in its VO (version original). And, no, we didn't ride on the 40-ton mechanical walking elephant, so we have to go back.

The morning we left Nantes, we made a short drive to the Atlantic coast at a place called Pornic. We spent a few hours at the beach before driving home in the afternoon. After an initial unforeseen period of abject terror of the waves for Betsy, who has loved the ocean and the beach as recently as October, the girls had a good time building in the sand and visiting with all of the mussels, snails, and barnacles in the nearby tidal pools.