By the seaside

Feeling the need for a bit of a break, and with hot, sunny weather, a trip to the seaside was in order.  Not too far to go; a three-hour drive, and I got it into my head that I wanted to eat a breakfast of coffee and croissant on a sea-front café.  Mission accomplished: an early start, and three hours later I was in the morning queue for croissants in a bakery just back from the harbour, with a hot coffee waiting for me.

A day and overnight at Perros-Guirec on the North Brittany coast, famous for its pink granite coastline.  A stroll round the town and its shoreline, a nice dinner, a mosey along the "coastguards trail" the next morning, and back home via a fabulous garden.

 In the Google Earth image below, the town of Perros-Guirec is what occupies the peninsula on the right side of the picture.  We parked up by the marina at the bottom right of the picture, and spent the day strolling around the peninsula along the coast path, to the large beach you can see in the middle of the picture, and back through the town centre.  The Coastguards Trail took us from the left-hand end of the big beach, North-West to the peninsua and back into the bay in the top left of the picture.

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The area calls itself Hydrangea City, and you can see why: enormous Hydrangeas everywhere, the soil seems to be acidic which brings out the best variety of colours; blue, red, crimson even, and white.  They are everywhere.  Sometimes the paint job on the house doesn't quite harmonise with them, though.

Traditional house construction is granite and slate, and there were plenty of examples dotted between the modern pale yellow stucco constructions.  Some of the slate roofs were genuine hand-cut too, or seemed to be.