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Our big trip – by pod

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Bonne Année from Josselin!

After an early start involving the 7:55 substitute bus to Bray and a slow train to Rosslare Europort I was pleased to board the ferry Salamanca and explore the ship, and my cabin for the next 17 hours.
Fairly sparse but comfortable.

The ship was not as large as the Viking Line ships we took from Finland to Sweden but it was big enough and quite new so well fitted out. There were just the two restaurants but the food was French so I was happy. In the evening they had a young woman providing live music for a while, I was a bit anxious about that until it became clear that all her songs were very definitely from my era 🙂

Getting there. The ship had very efficient stabilisers so I was disappointed to find very little motion, just enough to make walking up and down the stairs a bit tricky.
We presumably turned a corner around Cornwall and then headed up La Manche to Cherbourg.
After a very pleasant sleep it was time for breakfast before we docked at 8am French time.
There were very few passengers on board, it’s hard to see how they could make any money on this trip.
Arriving in Cherbourg
There was a shuttle to the Gare which myself, a nice French gentleman and an Irish couple took, we got there quite early for the 10:45 train to Lison.
So the Frenchman and myself went and found a café nearby “La Cave du Monkey” for a coffee.
It was a nice bar but quite quirky. The French are nothing if not eccentric. People say the English are eccentric, well I think the French quite easily trump them in that department!
“La cave du monkey”

The Frenchman and I got on well, he was an interesting chap. He’d worked in a bank for thirty years and then quit that and opened his own Cave selling at first just wine and then expanding to whisky. He was naturally interested in the Cave du Monkey, he said they had some good stuff on sale. Nice guy, retired now and living in Caen.

At 10:45 we jumped on the train to Lison where I changed to the NOMAD train to Rennes, which certainly lived up to its name, it went all over Normandy and bits of Brittany before finally arriving in Rennes at 2:30. Nice train though, it had big windows and the countryside is spectacular. I took the 2:45 bus to Josselin, arrived just in time to get some groceries in and make myself some sausages for dinner. I had a drink with our friend Lewis just up the road, then a fairly early night. Long couple of days. I do like traveling by ship though, it’s my favourite. Pauline arrives today via the Eurostar after stopping in the UK to visit Louisa in Birmingham and our friends Lucy and David in Oxford. Long day for her and you don’t get a cabin on the train! But she prefers it, fair enough.

Happy New Year to everyone!

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