Concarneau and Carnac

Mom, Dad and I visited two beautiful cities on the coast this morning after taking the kids to school. We started out in the 14 century walled city of Concarneau about an hour north of here. They were having their bi-weekly open air market so we strolled the market before going into the walled part of the city. Inside the "fortified" city, we were able to walk along the ramparts as well as the narrow cobble-stoned streets and peruse the stores filled with traditional Breton items. Concarneau is still a busy fishing port city so there were lots of boats to admire out on the water. We ate lunch in a beautiful little creperie before hitting the road to head back toward Vannes. About 30 km outside of Vannes, we went to the town of Carnac. Carnac is the home of the largest site of megaliths in Europe. Megaliths are huge stones that were stood upright out of the earth and aligned in a particular order for some reason. The Carnac alignments are from the Neolithic era and believed to be from the time period of 5000 to 2000 BC. In Carnac, there are nearly 4000 stones aligned in this manner. There are many legends as to why these stones were aligned this way but there are no real certainties. The mostly likely reason has to do with worshipping the sun god. Anyway, it was very interesting to stroll through this area, admire these stones, some of which are more than 13 feet high, and to marvel at the amount of work that must have been put into this. After the megaliths, we headed into the village of Carnac which houses a pre-history museum, a beautiful 17th century church, and many cute little shops and restaurants. By 4 p.m., we needed to head home, pick up the puppy, pick up the kids and then head out to the town and beaches of Sene which is where we lived when we first moved here. We showed Mom and Dad our old house, our favorite beaches and then strolled the seawall and collected some shells. The weather could not have been more perfect with temperatures of about 20 degrees and perfectly blue skies. Gorgeous!!