France, St Malo

St Malo is a very large fortified town about 30k's down the coast from where we are at Dinan. Dinan is on the river Rance and this used to be a major thoroughfare for transporting fresh goods to St Malo. At our end it is quite small, at the St Malo end, the exact opposite. St Malo is a modern day thriving commercial port, and this sits quite comfortably with the historic part of town. The fortified wall is impressive, dates from the 14thC and is largely still intact, particularly on the seaward side. We had a lazy start to the day, leaving Dinan about 9.30am. It was already quite hot and 31 degrees by the time we arrived in St Malo. This is the hottest day we've had since leaving Lake Como. And, as was the case there, it seems every hot day has to finish in a thunderstorm. It arrived a whole lot earlier though. We were watching it build most of the day and just got tickets for a water taxi to take us across the inlet to another town, Dinard. It was starting to look pretty serious so we made the decision to skip the ride and go onto a Chateau that we had planned to see. Half way there we revised again and went straight home, driving most of the way through it. Luckily for us we managed to see a fair bit of old St Malo - a town now high on my list of great towns. Roge hasn't seemed to mind the early return home - he gets a whole afternoon to watch Le Tour!Read more