Backing up the bus

Today our plan was to go back to one of the towns we missed out on yesterday. Dinan was supposed to be quite nice, so we decided to go back there for today. If there was time we would have a bit of a walk around Avranches.

Dinan photos are up on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157646496241266/

It seemed like a trend so far in France, with mum with us - barely able to find a park anywhere. We navigated to the centre of town, which took us near but not exactly inside the town's ramparts - we seem to have found every rampart-surrounded town in France. And we couldn't find a park. We ended up parking in a backstreet and walking to the old town. I mean, we'd walked 4 klicks from Luxembourg, but mum wasn't going to do that. At all. So a 20-minute walk had to be our limit.

The weather was rather worrying - the rain had been hanging around in fits and starts most of the morning. Luckily it cleared up enough to take photos, but it was still producing white backgrounds. Fortunately after a while the cloud dissipated a bit and there was a little bit of blue sky.

We came across a section of the ramparts that housed a museum. I wanted to go in, mum and dad didn't. Probably something to do with the fact that I got about 80% off as a student. It was less than 2 Euros for me to go in. It was actually quite nice - but not something I might've paid full price for:

Dinan ramparts museum

The highlight for me was the spectacular views of the town, almost 360 degrees, from the very top of the highest tower:

The view of Dinan

After that I headed around the outskirts of the old town, which for medium-sized towns was actually quite small. I came across what translated literally as 'The English Garden', bordering on the obligatory enormous local church. It was quite nice, and there were a couple of parts of the ramparts that extended out, giving spectacular views of the valley down below:

English Garden

I got a message from mum, telling me that they were changing the meeting location. I couldn't understand where they were waiting, so I went to the tourist office to get my bearings. Cue another phone call, and eventually we met halfway, where we had gone into the old town. By then it had started pouring with rain, so we scurried back to the car and headed back to Avranches. The weather didn't improve at all, so we sat in the house for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow we'll be starting the long two-day haul from Normandy to Cornwall. Back to the English language! See you over there.