The traveller returns

Well. That was nice :)

We drove around our area of Brittany quite a lot, looking at bits of coast and headlands. The one touristy place that we went to was Mont St-Michel which is a little abbey built on an islet in the eighth century (destroyed and then rebuilt in the thirteenth century - but it's still the same abbey, you understand) and nowadays is one of France's big tourist attractions and to this end is packed full of shops selling crappy souvenirs and refreshments. We battled our way through the crowds up the single narrow cobbled street and found, when we reached the building itself, that we were expected to pay to enter and climb to the top. Seeing as we'd already paid to get into the car park, and that we wouldn't attain much of a view in any case since the air wasn't very clear, we decided to just stand around and admire the view from where we were. No photographs of the beautiful landscape, but there's a nice one floating around of the Mont St-Michel car park, reaching off into the hazy distance.

In all the two weeks I spent rather a lot of time stretched out in front of beautiful patches of seaside, enjoying the sun and reading. We had gorgeous weather most of the time, although there were a few days of rain and storms (apparently one night there was a thunderstorm so incredibly loud that the walls of our gîte shook on several occasions. My window was open. I never once woke up), and the only annoying thing about sitting outside was the presence of some tiny black bugs which turned up everywhere, and constantly. Every few minutes you could look down and there'd be yet another one crawling on your arm or your leg, and one day I noticed a couple of rather motionless bugs inside the LCD screen of my MP3 player. They have since vanished, although one did make a brief reappearance the other day in the middle of the screen. I just hope this doesn't mean they're actually crawling around inside the entire player and finding things to eat in there. The bug that ended up inside my laptop monitor was rather more irritating since it actually was crawling around. It survived for two days and then (presumably) died somewhere offscreen.

Yes, the laptop. I forswore computers and then promptly packed my laptop, Mandrake Linux CDs and instructions, and print-outs of three emails I received the day before I left so that I could reply to them. To serve me right for such an act, the Mandrake CDs wouldn't run at all (which is possibly something to do with my having only 16MB RAM instead of the required 32MB or recommended 64MB) and I only got around to doing just less than one email.

On a similar subject, I only succumbed once to the temptation of an internet café, although this fact sounds a little less impressive when I mention that it was the one and only day that we were in a town. However, I was only there for half an hour, and spent ten minutes of that writing a very short email; I had to unlearn touch typing so that I could actually use the AZERTY keyboard. Commas where the M should be, A and W down the bottom, having to use Shift to type a number or even a full stop... Thoroughly frustrating. And rather expensive as well, which meant that I rediscovered what it is to quickly browse blogs under time constraints. I couldn't even think about reading linky blogs or blogs with a habit of leaning towards essays, because I wouldn't have had time to look through all the links or to read leisurely through all the long posts. Almost like being on per-minute dial-up :)

The nearest town had a small harbour with a lighthouse on the end of a pier and a tendency towards very picturesque sunsets as evidenced herein. And we walked around, drove around, wined and dined (including a proper Breton gallette because, dammit, you have to in these circumstances) and pretty soon the whole two weeks had gone and we were packing again.

And now I'm playing catch-up with everything and getting annoyed with monthly archives that display posts in reverse chronological order, because that makes it so much harder to read through them.

But still. I'm back.