Nantes – Less Car, More Life

A sunny day with a tailwind on Nantes Brest canal. One of the many écluse buildings. Lock keeper houses.

The Nantes Brest canal, conceived by Napoleon as a strategic inland connection of two important ports to avoid the British controlled ocean, is 390 kms long. That’s a good distance for a nice long game of Bike Touring Bingo.

Leaving Nantes. The canal starts a bit outside of Nantes proper, and the leaving of cities is frequently a bit of a jumble.

Pastry break! At 17 kms. That’s a chocolate babka from marguerite Boulangerie du coin in Nantes.

Bike Touring Bingo is an adaptation to the office game BS Bingo, where you and your co-workers would have made up Bingo cards on the xerox machine of all your boss’s favorite and overused phrases, to be checked off during interminable conference calls.

Babka ready for its close up. Hazelnut and chocolate.

Bike touring bingo is much more free form. It’s any bike touring eventuality – such as having to open all four panniers to find the thing you’re searching for. Or getting stung by nettles. It can also be any French cliche, for example an elegant French woman bicycling by with a baguette in her basket.

Canal this way! Oddly named snail restaurant also this way? That sign deserves a bingo square.

It’s steadily getting warmer and the day is calm but with a nice tailwind.

The travel planner stops to admire a helpful map.

Lunch break in Nort-sur-Erdre. We’re appreciating how well benched and picnic tabled this route is.

We’re on a Camino de Santiago trail. We chatted with one pilgrim and saw two others. They had 1,200 kilometers to walk to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

We’re headed the opposite direction from the pilgrims so merrily we roll along.

Bike touring bingo square! French gentleman in striped shirt smoking a ciggy while piloting a boat. I got bonus points the next day when I saw the same guy (I think) having a wee by the side of a marina.

Our first night on the canal in Blain at a lovely Chambre d’hôte, Le Nid d’Omer. We’re trying to remember to take photos of our rooms before we dump our panniers and make an ugly mess.

Bingo! Well behaved chambre d’hôte cat observing breakfast.

The canal links up four rivers, so it’s fascinating to see the change from canal to river. It was quite a clever engineering feat as only 20% of the route had to be made from scratch.

Here’s a tiny Rich riding past a boat in a canal section.

And here he is waiting for me to catch up in Fégréac on a section of L’Isac River. So many birds!

Between those two photos was a coffee/tea/Easter chocolate break.

And a lunch break. Although the path was busy this Easter Sunday, we always found places to stop and sit.

In our travels around the world we’ve always felt welcome as Americans, or at least not disliked. We always say people are good at distinguishing between a person and the country’s politics. But these are different times. Awful things are happening and the USA is responsible. We questioned if we wanted our American flags on our bikes at all. But we are American, we have to own it. Rich has a French flag to show our affection for France, and my No Kings flag hopefully conveys our lack of support for the current administration. We’ve had quite a few conversations so far and no French person has been anything but kind and understanding and as upset as we are about the war.

“I’m a little potato and I believe in you.” Thank you little potato at the crêpe restaurant in Redon.

Crêpes and cider. The Breton stand by for dinner. Delicious.

Dessert crêpe with
caramel beurre salé. Salted caramel sauce. Yum.

No photo of the hotel room in Redon. It was adequate. And small. We thought Redon would be a bit of a nothing town, and quite empty on Easter Sunday evening, but it turned out to have a lot of half timbered buildings and some fascinating historical plaques to help tourists understand the history of the buildings.

Half timbered building from the 1600s, now with shops on the ground floor, as many were originally both businesses and dwellings it’s fitting.

Nettles. Rich won that bingo square with a “shortcut” suggested by Komoot. Thankfully it was a small nettling.

Person traveling with a donkey? Is that on my Bingo card? It is now.

I forgot his name, but he had just bought the donkey and he was headed out for a ten year ramble! With his cat too, who is wearing a GPS collar and was not happy about the crazy cat lady wanting to get her hands on him.

Lunch. Smoked salmon for Rich and peanut butter and dried cranberries for me.

Crossing through Malestroit. This is perhaps one of the most interesting and beautiful canals we’ve ridden.

The riding surface of the path is mostly really smooth fine gravel.

My ongoing love affair with French bike route signage.

Château de Josselin. On the Oust River. Still the residence of the 14th Duke of Rohan.

Part two of our canal ride up in our next post.

Rich at the Quai de Versailles of the Erdre River in Nantes.

Yes, I admit straight off that we will need to visit Nantes again. We first came through in September 2023 and spent two nights mostly taking care of business and exploring the old town streets. We went to Les Machines de l’Île which is a fun steam punk type attraction. This time we spent two nights mostly taking care of business (laundry, blogging and travel planning) and exploring the new transit and bike improvements, and a trip to Trentemoult, a small fishing village turned art village.

But first things first. A beer and a glass of wine. Le Chemin De Traverse Bar à Bières. In the USA, beer focused places frequently do not have wine, that’s almost never a problem in France.

After a good night’s sleep, despite some fellow hotel guests being inconsiderate until a big American opened the door and scowled at them, we headed out to visit Trentemoult. Best part? You get to take a little ferry boat across the River Loire.

So much work going on in Nantes. A new bridge, the Anne de Bretagne bridge, is being built for two new tram lines, bikes, and “Beyond its practical function, the bridge was primarily designed as a place for strolling.”!

The towers of the new bridge, connecting the city to the Île de Nantes.

Yes, it’s raining a bit but that doesn’t stop anyone.

The new ferry terminal on the Trentemoult side.

It’s a short walk to the town from the new terminal and you have a few things to see. La Pendule. Yes, that pendulum is swinging – except in high winds.

Ador, a Nantes street artist with a lot of works in Nantes.

Good thing about cloudy skies? Nice light to take photos. That’s the river Loire, we’ve now cycled our missing link of the Loire and we can head off the river.

The narrow car free streets of the little village are very atmospheric. Especially in the mist.

Our bright cycling jackets fit right in.

I looked at this photo about five times before I realized it’s the zebra’s stripes hanging on the laundry line.

Our day in Nantes was technically a rest day. But with so much to see and do we end up walking about 20,000 steps anyway. Is that really a rest day?

Crossing the construction zone and seeing that Nantes is working on **three** new tram lines. Go Nantes!

Tram construction is catnip for the engineer and the transit advocate.

Street art and a bus built into this building.

The Île de Nantes is full of fun artistic delights.

An afternoon of laundry and chilling left us needing more walking, so off to the Jardin des Plantes we went. One advantage of early spring bike touring is the blooms.

The tram system, which Nantes is expanding, is already quite impressive. Not only for its free flowing movements, unhampered by car traffic, but also for the fun color schemes on the trams.

Rich added for scale in front of yet another patterned tram.

We were also very impressed with the intersections on one of Nantes’ main streets, Cr des 50 Otages. The name of the street is another reason for us to come back to Nantes, to visit the history museum. The name of the boulevard pays tribute to the 50 hostages or victims of a WW2 event.

The intersections along this street have been redesigned with traffic circles unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Almost zero markings. Here it is from the view of a cyclist biking through.

And from the Google street map view of a double circle. Tram tracks and pedestrian plaza space to the left, Bus and car lane, bike lanes in the middle, another bus car lane, and then more sidewalk space.

We rode this street on our way out of Nantes towards the Nantes Brest canal. It took us to an area we hadn’t visited and gave us another reason to come back to Nantes- the basin of the Erdre River with the Île de Versailles and live aboard boats and loads of quai side attractions.