Sunday 30th June 2019
This morning Ann had a further look around the chapel at Kermaria (we had been a bit rushed yesterday owing to the two weddings).
We moved on stopping at Lanvollon to take on diesel and at Guingamp to service the van at the town aire de camping cars. We had a walk around Guingamp. Here are the old town walls.
We saw this interesting statue. Didier Drogba the great Ivorian footballer started his professional career playing for Guingamp.
Here's the church.
The town square is very attractive.
The square is set up as a surrogate beach with deckchairs and fountains.
This ornate fountain in the square is decorated with Griffins.
An effigy of the Black Virgin can be found in the church.
There are some nice old houses in town.
We moved on and stopped for the day at the aire de camping cars in the tiny remote village of L'etang-Neuf. There is a nice lake here. The aire was filled with cars attending a celebration in the nearby Auberge. With no preparation whatsoever we set off to walk around the lake. Me in flipflops, Ann in sandals, no map, no gps, no phone.
To begin with everything was easy. We followed the path which we assumed would take us around the lake.
At one stage we got a tantalising glimpse back across the lake to the Auberge.
The "path" became more and more tenuous.
At times it became very difficult to work out whether there was a path at all.
By now we had absolutely no idea where the lake was in relation to where we were.
We passed some huge boulders with a large tree growing out of them.
We waded through deep vegetation down long unused forest tracks.
After wading through a stream we came to a large meadow. We had absolutely no idea where we were or which way to go. I have a compass on my watch but as we had not noted the direction we were going when we left the village we had no clue as to which direction to take to get back to it. By now the idea of trying to retrace our steps was unthinkable. Somehow we had to continue forward and find a way back to civilisation.
At the far end of the meadow we entered the forest again. The very tenuous path eventually led us to a field of wheat which led us to a farm track and eventually to a road which passed this old chapel.
Here's a close up of the little statue above the chapel door.
We followed the road hoping for the best. We passed this interesting little cottage.
With this interesting name. Soon afterwards more by luck than anything else we arrived back at our parking place.
All this ended okay but it was not good. We got ourselves into a situation where we had no idea where we were in a very remote place, no one else knew where we were and we had no means of communicating with anyone had we got into serious difficulties. Worse still we were totally under equipped for what we had taken on - flipflops, sandals, no phone, no map, no gps - insanity!
Today we travelled 28 miles (45 kilometres) in our van - no idea how far we travelled on foot but it was a very long way! We are at N48.41874 W3.10821
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