We wake to thick fog - you can't see to the next bend. Someone from Locaboat is pressure-washing one of their boats and shouts "Slow down" to some idiot barreling past at an unsafe speed. Interesting that he used English, not French - it is the default option if you don't know what language the idiot understands.
Fog lifts mid-morning to blue skies and sunshine and we set off to go further towards Brest on the Nantes-Brest canal. We pass through the lock at Rieux before lock closing time, but we won't make it to Beaumont lock, so we stop at the tiny village of St-Congard, and go for a walk. Again the village seems deserted. Clearly at lunchtime the French are all eating dejeuner somewhere, not walking about. St-Congard is quite rural - vegie gardens and a grassy yard that has half a dozen goats and some hens. We have a peek in the church which is large and looks relatively new - stained glass is dated 1934. It would hold a couple of hundred people - in the entry porch it says "Mass on the third Sunday of each month". So much space, so little use.
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| St-Congard |
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| Old and new |
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| St-Congard |
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| Interior of the church at St-Congard |
We return to the boat and continue through the next lock. We are now passing through farmland rather than forest, lots of fields of sweet corn, an orchard, occasional cows and horses. We see one industrial building with a tall chimney which we later discover is the Emmental cheese factory.
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| Canal travel is so peaceful |
On to the third lock for the day where for the first time we have to wait for someone coming downstream before we can go in. There's already a boat on the tie-up pontoon, so we just prop in the canal until the other boat goes past. Through the lock, round a couple more bends in the Oust and we reach Malestroit, tie up on the first pontoon because we think the one nearer the next lock will be more crowded. Go ashore, walk up the river, and confirm this.
From there we walk into Malestroit which is another lovely French town - it's designated a Petit Cite de Caractere. A St Augustines Convent, a huge central square, lots of C16 and C17 houses, and a pedestrian-only area full of bars and restaurants. After a walk around this area we return to the main square where there is a supermarket as we need to re-stock breakfast juice and emergency rations in case we can't eat ashore some time (cheese, biscuits, fruit, eggs). Return to the boat to store the shopping, and then have a rest before returning to dine. It takes us a little while to find a restaurant that isn't complet, but when we do we enjoy the meal and find that once again we are in the same restaurant as three couples from England on a hire boat that was moored near us in St-Martin-sur-Oust. We have a chat on the way out and then do another walk around Malestroit before returning to the boat.
There will be more pictures of Malestroit tomorrow - it's very photogenic.
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