Nantes

Up nice and early for our cabin inspection and off to Nantes. We even had our breakfast at a roadside ‘Aire’ along the way. At Nantes we went to the ‘Machines de L’Ile’, on the Ile de Nantes, home of the Grand elephant, a massive steampunk contraption that ferries 40-odd people around the former home of the city’s shipbuilding industry, bellowing and blowing steam at passers-by from it’s trunk. It’s a pretty awesome sight – all carved wood and leather, levers, gears and bolts. We went on the Carousel de Mondes Marins – a three-storey, partly concrete-clad affair populated by similar, smaller, marine-themed denizens – and had a look in the workshop and gallery and a stroll around the old slipways, dry-docks, piers and cranes of the Ile. Afterwards we drove to the last base of our holiday – a typical compound-looking B&B on an industrial estate at Caen - near the WWII Memorial – stopping off along the way for further Aire-based coffee and pastries…