Wooden guards on duty

This morning we left our little B&B in Dol and cycled to Saint-Malo. Dol was still pretty in the morning, but the large number of cars - parked and moving - made the small centre look quite ugly and hard to navigate. It was much nicer last night with very few cars about.

We had a pretty leisurely cycle to Saint-Malo, didn't break any speed or distance records and overall it went rather well and we didn't get lost. In Saint-Malo we unloaded our bikes into the hotel room and then went cycling up to the big shopping centre to get a few bits and bobs to take home and for breakfast/dinner tomorrow.

Once the shopping was completed we then cycled into the walled part of the city. We had several hours to kill so went for a walk round the walls, onto the beach and then in and out of the city's streets. Today's main picture and one of the extras are the timber see defences, that help to soften the effects of the Atlantic on the city's walls. There is another extra of the Vauban designed Fort National that was built to keep the English out (didn't work to well then...) and finally a gull that had managed to steal an ice-cream cone of someone.

I love Saint-Malo, it's one of my favourite places in France. The walled city is so pretty, and if you ignore the odd tourist shop is actually surprisingly modest and not as bad as some places you can visit. It's sadly far too expensive and impractical for us to ever afford to live there, but it's always nice to dream...

For dinner we went to a Crêperie on the ramparts. I should be a horribly expensive tourist trap, but it's actually a pretty good place to dine - though not the cheapest we've ever been too. We had a nice view of the sun setting out to see and then we walked back to out bike - which were where we left them - and finally cycled back to our hotel for the last night in Brittany for a while.