Today we encountered some of that enemy of which I wrote yesterday. The wind today was like a hurricane and though on the map the distance seemed short, in actuality it felt like a hundred kilometers.
It began rather nicely I must admit, with a long bike in a sheltered hollow between a hillside and a forest. An enormous bird, perhaps an owl of some sort, swooped low down over my head and disappeared into the forest. Soon we came to a place where the road cut through the heart of a hill and as we pass through the hill the wind began to pick up and it never slackened the rest of the day.
By the time we reached the outskirts of Rennes we were beat and were dreading the search we have in every city, the search for our camping spaces. Happily Rennes seemed to think it was a bit of tourist town and the way to the campground was very well marked, and much nearer than we had expected, though as exhausted as we were, we still complained. The campground was set in the Parc des Gayeulles, a vast parkland in the northeastern corner of the city. The parc had a pool at the entrance, a model farm for school children, two lakes, one for model boats, a skating rink, soc…sorry…football fields, a campground and an acre of forested land crisscrossed by walking paths. It was a beautiful complex to have in the heart of a city. All right, not in the heart, perhaps the upper left shoulder blade.
We found a spot for our tent well sheltered in a hollow created by some trees. Heather found to her dismay that night that she had placed her sleeping bag directly over a rabbit hole, making it difficult to sleep. Her dismay was nothing compared to the rabbit's.
We took a short break and listened to the wind howl in and the rain come down in torrents. More through luck than anything else winds that had been hurricane force outside our hollow were merely gentle breezes for us and the rain only spasmodic drops.
After our break we hit the tourist trail and marched into town so bundled in our raingear that only tips of our noses emerged to prove that we were human and not escaped storm troopers from Star Wars.
Rennes proved to be, despite the awful weather, a truly delightful city, though it was Sunday and most everything was closed or being used for a church service. Rennes seemed to epitomize a French city. We walked down tiny medieval streets with half-timbered houses towering in crooked fashion above us and a truly medieval river of water running down the centre gutter of cobblestones.
We walked through wide boulevards sealed off to traffic with haute couture shops displaying the latest fashions on either side. There was so much to see that we came nowhere close to seeing it all. We walked through the square that housed the city hall and opera, looking as though they were parts of the same building split apart, city hall in a crescent, the opera in a half circle, as though to let the public through.
Rennes had been a relatively important city even in the era of Roman domination and would become the official seat of the Parliament of Brittany in 1562, giving the area the ability to remonstrate against the king. But it was virtually destroyed in a massive fire in 1720. It was very charming, though all the construction detracted a little. The Hall of Commerce was an enormous building that we first mistook for a railway station. The women’s abbey for Benedictine nuns was a strange building with the letters
MAGDATATNEDLFAYETTE
written across the front, making no sense at all to us plebs and since it wasn’t open we never found out what it meant. The pool, however, was very obviously the public pool and it was stunningly beautiful. The front sported the face of Neptune
and ceramic mosaics of running water cascaded down virtually every wall. With the amount of rain that was pouring down it was hard to believe the mosaics weren’t real.
In fact it was raining so hard that our feet were soaked through and water was even making its way through the waterproof fabric of our rain jackets. After checking in on one cathedral that, for some reason, seemed to be chopped in half, and finding it full of a congregation at mass,
we decided to begin the long walk home.
And long it seemed. We were wet and very miserable. The rain was coming down like someone had left on a faucet. But Rennes was well worth the walk. Heather in particular enjoyed looking through the windows of the very expensive shops downtown and perusing their collections of Venus Flytraps and carnivorous Pitcher Plants. She also enjoyed looking at the prominent displays of high fashion lingerie adorning certain shops. I can’t say I hurried her along.
I enjoyed the overall feeling of the city. The architecture seemed to convey the atmosphere of so many times, from the cramped spaces of the middle ages to the wide open avenues of the republic. It was great to walk down streets with names like Rue Victor Hugo and to have street signs with little blurbs identifying the person and the reason they deserved to have a street named after them, It is really hard to convey Rennes in words because it was more the atmosphere of the city that made it so distinct and yet so French and even if I describe every building and every sculpture it would still be lacking the feel.
Finally we got back to the campground and found it in shambles. A virtual gale had had blown through and destroyed some of the more permanent sites, those with a trailer and a tent attached. Although it does beg the question of why anyone would put a fridge, a stove, a sink and an entire kitchen cabinet set, not to mention wooden floors, in a structure as flimsy as a tent. We hurried through the campground to check on our tent and found it, to our surprise, as well as relief, to be perfectly fine, completely sheltered in it’s little hollow.
People here often live in trailers all year round or set them up as summer residences so that every campground we go to is half filled with trailers even though the place is completely deserted.
On our way out (a little backtracking) we had explored the park a little. The goats in the model farm ran over to us excitedly as we passed and they bit at the fence angrily when we didn’t feed them or provide them with shelter. The poor creatures were soaked even worse than we.
We also stopped at the little animal enclosure to watch the animals. We couldn’t identify the species exactly but the closest thing at home would be antelope. The males of this species had far bigger horns, however, a rack that reminded us of miniature deer. They were very fleet and graceful and didn’t seem to mind the rain one bit. They did keep looking at all the people standing forlornly in the rain, watching us as if we might not be all that right in the head. I think they may have been right.
That night we had the worst windstorm yet, and I hope ever. We watched a little, stunned, from the shelter of our hollow where we felt only the smallest of breezes, as the trees bent before wind that sounded like a train, as tent fabric tore and things went flying across the campground.
Fortunately we had learned from the last windstorm and we plugged our ears up tight with earplugs and slept like…well, people exhausted from a really long day of doing touristy things. I don’t know for certain but I think even the rabbit under Heather was grateful for the tent that night.
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