I’m away on holiday at the moment, so this week’s posts are about previous un-blogged holidays from 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Yesterday was our 2021 holiday to Kent and East Sussex, and today it’s our 2022 holiday to Brittany.
By the summer of 2022, almost all Covid restrictions were gone and so we ventured outside of England for the first time in three years. We returned to our usual holiday format of a couple of weeks in France, staying in a Eurocamp static caravan, and this time, we went to Brittany in Northern France.
I’ve been to Brittany a few times, but it was the first time for our then six-year-old and my wife Christine. We stayed near Carnac on the Atlantic coast, which is well-known for the Carnac Stones – around 3000 standing stones across the area.
Here’s where we visited:
St Malo
The easiest way to get to Brittany from England is by ferry, and so we took the overnight Portsmouth-St Malo ferry with Brittany Ferries. As (for once) we didn’t have a long drive on arrival in France, we spent the first morning in St Malo, having a wander around the town and harbour. The town is fortified, and inside the town walls there’s a Micro Zoo, with lots of small animals. It’s a nice little place, if not especially interesting, and was enough to pass the morning before heading onwards to Carnac.
Pont Aven
Pont Aven is a scenic little town in Brittany that’s home to lots of artist studios. We took advantage of the all day kid’s club at the campsite to have a grown-ups only day here. It’s a nice place to wander around – it’s in a steep-sided valley with a river running through it.
Parc de Branféré
We always seem to end up at a zoo on our holidays, and this year it was Parc de Branféré. Make sure you stick around for the bird show, as they bring out all of the hand-reared birds pretty much all at once. It was fantastic being able to get so close to the animals – many are not locked away in enclosures, but free to roam around. It’s definitely one of my top five zoos that I’ve visited.
Insectarium de Lizio
Another zoo of sorts, but this time focussed mostly on insects. As well as many preserved examples in frames, there were a number of live insects here, as well as a bee colony and an outdoor butterfly garden. It was certainly enough to fill a morning, even if it’s not a very big place. And you probably need to like insects to really enjoy it.
Museum of the Junkyard Poet
Also in Lizio (which in reality is a rather small village) is the Museum of the Junkyard Poet, which we found whilst browsing TripAdvisor. It’s a fabulously whimsical place in the Brittany countryside, with buildings and contraptions made out of discarded materials. It’s very, very French, but fun to explore with lots of hidden things. Oh, and there were loads of frogs all over the place.
Quiberon
Quiberon is a town on the end of a peninsula that pokes out into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a port for ferries to a few islands in Quiberon Bay, the largest being Belle-Île-en-Mer (which literally translates as, um, ‘pretty island in the sea’). There’s nice sandy beaches and it’s a seaside resort, sort-of like Blackpool but sunnier and French.
