Wondrous Chartres and Lovely, Lovely Brittany

Wondrous Chartres and Lovely, Lovely Brittany
The French have an extraordinary capacity for capturing complex ideas in a visual format – please note the universal symbol for ‘tourist’ seen on a directional sign in Chartres. And while I was not hooked up to an iPod, my camera was definitely in overdrive in this fascinating medieval town that seems to have yet another incredible church every five or six feet. Looming over all, tho, is Notre Dame de Chartres, a positively ENORMOUS edifice totally encrusted with sculptures on the outside and a complete set of stained glass on the inside and it is perpetually being cleaned because once you finish cleaning the whole thing about thirty years has gone by and you just have to start over again. I’ve included an interior shot of the gorgeously clean arched ceiling in the central nave, and another of the wall of the nave where you can see the lovely restored yellow stone above and the dark grey grimy not-yet-restored section below and yes, that really is the only difference. It is truly surreal to find out that this cathedral was also BUILT in just thirty years (1198-1230) through an extraordinary act of determination by the church and the town (Anne-Marie tells me that since the pilgrim trade was mighty lucrative at that time there were solid economic reasons to finish it quickly as well). The cathedral is both a photographers dream and a photographers nightmare – you just can’t take enough pictures because all you have to do is look three inches to the left to see something entirely new. So we had a wonderful 24 hours or so in the town (yup, the food was great here too) church-gazing and staying up til midnight once again so that we could fully appreciate the light shows projected at night onto the historic buildings (remember that it doesn’t get really dark until 11:00 or so). And we even discovered a church Anne-Marie had not seen before (shocking), the marvelous St. Pierre which was started in the year 1000 (yes) and you could see all sorts of relics of earlier Romanesque stages of construction overlaid by the later, more elaborate Gothic style. Brilliant inside, and amazing outside, especially at night with the projected images turning it into a fantastic tapestry (see pic).
And then it was on to Brittany and Anne-Marie’s 19th c stone farmhouse in La Ville Daniou in the midst of a breathtaking region where the Rance River flows out to a rocky coast punctuated with one gorgeous beach after another, and one marvelous town after another with narrow pedestrian streets winding through stone and timber frame buildings. The weather has been grand, so in between work sessions we have been combing beaches fringed by rocks covered with clusters of blue mussels waiting for the tide to come in. And here’s the food report - last night we stopped in the town of Dinar on the way back from the beach for a classic Breton meal – dinner crepes with mushrooms and eggs and scallops and leeks, dessert crepes with butter and sugar and flaming bananas, and a bottle of traditional strong cider. Amazing. Shortly we’re off to Carnac in southwestern Brittany to see the Druids – or rather, the much earlier Neolithic complex of dolmens, cairns, and standing stones that many desperately misinformed neo-Pagans would like to believe were built by the Druids. The truth is a much better story…