A quick, healthy breakfast and I headed to Ploumanac'h, the town most loved by the French. At least according to this sign by the chapel. In 2015. And I have no reasons to doubt that it still is. It's one of my favourites too.
I think we already 'did' the sculpture park, and I've taken you along the Sentier des Douaniers so many times you are doubtless tired of that, so, and in the spirit of trying something new because you really do never know what you may find, I headed in the opposite direction from the beach.
Oh, hello! A view of the pink castle...
I'd stopped here to sit on a bench and meditate for a few minutes.
I know, you are tired of seeing the pink castle.
Not everyone shares my passion for it.
One last one, with a little fence.
I've become quite enamoured of seaside scenes that include little fences. I think they remind me of my childhood and holidays at the beach which were, funnily enough, not that frequent.
The town's beach seen from up high with, of course, a little fence...
Another view with a little fence...
Last one with a fence, I promise.
The rocks in the foreground are known as La Baleine.
I have a very good imagination but it took a little squinting and moving around before I could see a whale in them. I think, perhaps, when viewed from the beach, with the tide coming in? I'll check that out next time...
The walk I took was on the Landes de Ploumanac'h.
There are a lot of such places called les landes de Somewhere or Other here.
It's very restful, very zen, very conducive to frequent pauses to breath, to smile, to meditate and to smell the flowers.
And to learn the lessons that life is always trying to teach us...
Such as, sometimes we are trying to survive in a hard and rocky place, sometimes we struggle to find the light, sometimes we have to be flexible and to bend, lest we break.
Lovely old pine trees, all gnarled and bent and some with broken branches...
"The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are stronger in the broken places." Hemingway
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." Emerson
I think that sums up my life in Brittany. I tried to follow the path that others walked. I tried to fit in with the herd, twisting myself out of shape during the process until I almost broke. I tried, and I failed. Now I walk where my heart leads me.
I loved seeing the yachts sail into view.
Sunday morning and people were out having fun.
Even though it looked like hard work from my lofty viewing point.
On the way back down I popped into the chapel.
I have a private cancer healing meditation that I find easy to engage with when I am in a holy place. Even though I am not religious.
St Guirec's little oratory on the beach.
It is nigh on impossible to avoid Breton saints here. They are everywhere. Most of the stories recount how these men, I think they were all men, came from Ireland and Wales and Cornwall to persuade the Bretons to leave their pagan ways and become Christians. Personally, I am more in the side of the pagans but I still love the saints and the tales of their miraculous deeds. All to be taken with a large pinch of sel, of course.
I didn't, of course.
I bought one ring, because I liked it, and I then left the shop without buying anything else, walked back towards the car to a shop where the owner IS polite and welcoming and bought several other souvenirs from her.
Life is too short to waste time on people and places that are not pleasant.
And with that, I got in my car and drove back to Trégastel for the afternoon...
A villa rented at Concarneau, a year's gap, another villa at Perros Guirec, two decades' gap, an elderly tumbledown house bought but somewhat further south in Loire Atlantique. Sold a decade later. Now old bones decree a warmer environment and the villas tend to be in the Languedoc. But one is never entirely shriven of hard rock-girt Brittany - the names with apostrophes, the bilingual road signs.
ReplyDeleteLater still I was to sail down down the Vilaine in my brother's yacht, enter the Bay, and observe Brittany from the sea. That - I promise you - is a revelation for Brittany is as much sea as it is rock.
At Trégastel I climbed an easy rock face in memory of my distant and more daring youth. The name caught my eye and I'm here briefly, being sentimental.