Today was Friday Sept 4
This is our last full day here at the house. We had already made arrangements to go back to the French friend of our friend for the Internet. Her husband, is home today so we park on the dead end. The dogs come to greet us, all three of them. I have bought snacks for the dogs but only Grommit likes them and takes them. The other dog takes one and goes and gives it to Grommit. How funny.
The French lady seems happy to see us and says to me, "May I kiss you?" and I agree so we do the double kiss on the cheeks, French style. Makes her happy. She tells us her hubby is asleep and asks us to whisper. Not a problem for me but husband has a deep booming voice is not much of a whisperer
. He has never been able to whisper much. We give her the rum travel cake we bought and she gives us coffee and cookies. Her husband wakes up and comes down with bed head but seems nice enough. So we're having good conversations while I am doing the Internet but not really a lot to do since our phones have been getting most of our mail, albeit slowly. And it's always fun trying to have a conversation when nobody really speaks the other's language very well. So we take our leave and head back to the house to drop off the computer. We plan to get to Saint Just today as our friend had a brochure on it that looked like it had great stuff.
Find our way to Saint Just and there are several locations. We had followed one the prior day and couldn’t find it really other than being in a forest. So we followed the other sign and found a parking lot. There was a path from the lot so followed it which crossed the road and eventually we found a long line of menhirs. Great! Yes, lots of menhirs. and what looked like a farmhouse with a windmill in the distance. Then we walked along the path for quite a ways but while there were possible remains of menhirs and stones, we couldn’t really find anything else except a few piles of stones so back to the car.
We decide to go fill up the car at Super U
. It is an odd gas pump where we have to pay by card and it says we have a limit of 180 euros. What that meant was it charged us the correct amount of what we spent but also put on hold the difference between what we spent and 180 euros. Supposedly it will clear off our account once they have the money for the gas. And luckily it did.
Went into the store to go to the bathroom and to get something. Can’t remember what. When we got back to the car, our GPS was dead, totally. Couldn’t get it to boot up at all. All week long it has been dropping off almost every day and we have to turn it back on and wait for it to reboot itself. So back into the store to see if we can buy a new Garmin. My hubby finally asks if they have a GPS because at this point, we don’t even know how to get back to the house where we are living!!! They carry TomTom’s so we buy it and have to get the display model. So we then sit in the car for about an hour getting it set and ready to go but as it comes with western Europe maps, at least we didn’t have to worry about downloading. I thought we would have to do that and go back to the French lady's house to do it. Now we have to get used to a different system. Our daughter originally had a TomTom and I liked it but then I got used to the Garmin. I also bought a map and have determined that I need to go with maps when I travel instead of depending so heavily on technology
.
So this was the lucky part of our trip. When I think of all the places we have been with all the tiny roads and single track roads and no name roads and all without a map, only the Sat Nav, OMG. we could have been lost in the backwoods of Brittany for weeks! Instead, our Sat Nav/GPS chooses to die on us in front of the one store in the area where we could get a replacement OR get a map. OMG indeed. How lucky was that!!!!!!We have finally found Monteneuf on the GPS as well. Couldn’t find it forever hardly but now it pops up so we go. We find the town but no signs for the monuments at all. There is a bakery open so I want to stop. We pull into the parking lot and a man unloading a truck comes and asks us to move. He is a traveling vegetable man and needs to use the spot where I just parked to put out his veggies.
Into the shop and they have a poster on the menhirs of Monteneuf. She doesn’t speak English but we manage to ask where the menhirs are and she directs us back towards Guer. So with our treats, we head towards Guer and we finally see signs that direct us to the Monteneuf site which is in a park and has the biggest parking lot of any of the megaliths we have visited
. Only two cars are there and when we walk up to the visitor’s center, it is already closed. But we walk down to the menhirs and see them and enjoy them. Funny, the site is right next to a busy road but it was so hard to find. Although we will probably never return, I put it in the GPS as a favorite just in case. How amazing that it is such a large site and such a large parking lot, complete with a visitors center and yet it doesn't show up on the maps nor on the Sat Nav's at all. just amazing that I wanted a pastry and we found it that way. Yep, our Lucky, Lucky day!
There was also an old long house recreation there and a small “village” of items like a plow and a traverse for carrying things. Good site.
Back to the house and now we start doing our packing and cleaning to get ready to leave tomorrow. Have all the rest of our meat that we can cook and anything that we cannot eat, pack up to leave. Still smelly from the manure so cannot be outside looking at stars.
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