Ding dong! Dinan!

I am attempting to wrap up the France part of this summer's travel blog and realized I totally neglected to do a post about Dinan. T and I spent our last evening together in the tiny medieval town. He'd read about it a couple months before we left and sort of fixated on a beautiful image that featured an immense aqueduct. It was a bit of an adventure finding the exact spot he was so taken with (aqueducts don't generally have addresses), but as you will see in the pictures, we managed to locate it. We also found some yummy pizza and ice cream.

St. Malo

The coastal city of St. Malo is located about 30 minutes away from Mont St. Michel and made a perfect home base for our exploration of the Brittany region. We had a quaint little room with a view out to the English Channel, not to mention some of the best service we've ever gotten for a room so cheap. St. Malo is a beautiful maritime city with a rich history of sailors, merchants and pirates. We were about a 20 minute walk from the old city, which is a walled medieval town full of shops, hotels, etc. We took the long way in to the city, collecting shells and strolling along the coast. It was incredible. Many windflowers were in bloom and parts of the path reminded me very much of the California coast. Later we enjoyed some souvenir shopping and a lunch of local mussels. It was a wonderful day.

Chamonix-Mont Blanc

Chamonix-Mont Blanc is a place whose perfection seems like it could only exist in a snow globe. But it turns out it's real. And it's even more amazing than I could have ever imagined. Somehow I made it there after a long and arduous road trip. It started when T and I woke up early in St. Malo to drive to Paris where he would be ending his journey and heading home. Needless to say, it was sad to see him go, and a little nerve racking as it was the start of my adventure alone. Thankfully, I had done a little driving up until this point, so I was feeling pretty confident about piloting "le Petit Bleu" (our rental Citroen, even smaller than my Mini, Miette) all the way from St. Malo to Paris and then to Chamonix. The drive is 1,100km or about 700 miles.
Most of the views from the road were of rolling green hills, vineyards, farmland teeming with the happiest looking cows, sheep and horses I've seen, and perfect little village after village. Then all of a sudden, Bam! Mountains! I don't know if I was just spaced out listening to my thoughts (one can only take a small amount of French radio), but it seemed like the gargantuan Alps just popped up out of nowhere and dominated the landscape for the last couple hours of the drive. It was without a doubt the most exciting drive I have ever taken. Last year, I drove Hwy 1 from San Diego to San Francisco and it was a mind altering experience. This was much the same but even more so because of how totally foreign the whole trip was. Several times, I drove through long stretches of tunnel under the mountains and found it claustrophobia inducing, especially the one that stretched over 10km only to pop out onto the most tall and treacherous bridge upon which I have ever driven. My adrenaline could not have been pumping more if I were driving in the Indy 500. I tried to snap a few photos, but they're pretty terrible as concentrating on not driving off of a cliff was my priority.
Anyway, after many hours, over 60USD in tolls, driving in circles around tiny Chamonix to find my hotel (thanks GPS), a near cry, having to turn on my prohibitively expensive iPhone data roaming to figure out my bearings, etc., I finally made it. And I never did leave until I absolutely had to.
To keep it simple, I basically spent a few days walking, thinking and reading. I took a cable car up to the summit of Aguille du Midi, a height of 3482m or about 12,600 feet. And I thought. And I read. And I walked. A lot. Here I had planned to stop in Chamonix for a day or two before heading west to Provence, and I even toyed with the idea of heading to Switzerland since it was so close, but that never happened. I just couldn't leave. And frankly, now that I have, all I want to do is go back. I am even more full of wanderlust than when I started.