Today's plan was to travel on the French trains for the first time this trip to prepare for Friday when we need to make three connections to get to Paris for our ICE train to Frankfurt. We walked to the station in Dinan for our 9:27 train to Dol de Bretagne and found no one in the ticket office and no staff on the platform. Since there was also no arrival and departure board, we asked a kind passenger whether we were "on the right track". He helped us but then a lady official suddenly appeared and told us that shiny train was not ours. We were to board the one on Platform B that was hiding behind it. It looked shabby, but did the job comfortably.
There was no first class, but it was a journey in history.
We showed our Eurail pass four times today with no problems and paid no money for our trip. We planned to go to Combourg, which is the town of Chateaubriand, a famous French writer, but looking at the timetables we decided to continue on to Rennes and visit Combourg on the way back today. We can change our minds as often as we like on TER trains when we have a pass.
The station at Rennes was surprisingly large and busy, so when we went to the ticket office to reserve seats on the TGV to Paris for a trial run on Wednesday, we had to wait 50 minutes to talk to a ticket seller. In the end we were served by a delightful young lady named Mathilde who looked very nervous and had her supervisor sitting behind her to help when needed. Malcolm showed her our requests on paper and spoke to her in French and she cleverly answered back in English and we had the usual half and half language conversation which eases the strain. She performed very competently, charging us 36 euros for two TGV trips and was very pleased when we used her name as we thanked her in French. A memorable experience; we like to imagine we were her very first customers and that she goes on to love her job, helping strugglers like us.
We spent a pleasant hour walking around the town in excellent weather. There were plenty of activities on this weekend because it is bank holiday and Pentecost holiday as well as Brittany Festival. We found many more half-timbered houses, some of them seeming to be leaning on each other for support. We looked at a church with an impressive steeple.
There were many official buildings that were built after fire destroyed most of the city in the eighteenth century.
One building had a vertical sundial like the one we saw in Munich and another one had an astrological pattern which we need someone else to interpret.
Coming back we alighted at Combourg and walked two kilometres into the town but we did not have time to find the castle and other features it was known for. So we had a good walk but did not see anything memorable, except this shared path which was cleverly designed to separate cyclists and pedestrians. Unfortunately it did not seem to go any further than the corner, and our walk into town was on a busy road with many cars parked on the footpath.
We changed trains again at Dol and snoozed into Dinan with enough time to shop for food at Carrefour City and be home before 5pm. We are looking forward to the bike race/event tomorrow.
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