Today we left our friends in Ancenis for Saint-Malo. We got to town and were eating lunch at Burger King when we realized it was Asa’s birth-time. He was born at 6:25am and it was 1:25pm in France (we had to add the time difference).

Asa celebrating his birth-time!

Our Airbnb host let us check in early so we dropped off our things and walked about a 10 minute walk to the wall that borders the fortified city.

A beach near our Airbnb that we didn’t get time to explore.

The wall!

When we were trying to find the nearest portal through the wall, we saw some seniors playing Pétanque. We have seen this played in several places. It looks similar to bocce ball but someone can correct me if I’m wrong.

We are getting near the end of our trip so we can do a little shopping now. I really wanted Briton bowls for all of us. They are special to this region. I had one from a trip here when I was a teenager that broke a while back and I wanted to replace it as well as get bowls for the kids and Nole. The problem is we have unique names, well except for me. Asa had the great idea to get the kids their middle names. I got my first name and Nole got “Papa” which means dad in French. We only need “Katherine” for Esme (they make it as a standard name but all the shops we checked were out). We will try again tomorrow.

Next we found a carousel and since I had been promising the kids a ride on one, I had to follow through even though it was not a very interesting one. They rode in the submarine. I forgot to take a picture of the outside.

There were some artists on the street and this man was making paintings using spray paint. We enjoyed watching him work and liked the surreal style of his art so we bought this painting which shows both Saint-Malo and Mont Saint-Michel.

Then we went down by the beach. We forgot our swim suits but the beach dress code in France seems to be very much “come as you are”. We have seen kids as old as 10 without any swimsuit on at all and most girls under 7 don’t wear a swim top, only bikini bottoms. Of course most have heard that there are topless women sunbathers and this is true though it’s more common at some beaches than others.

Quicksand! No really. It didn’t suck in more than your feet but the kids loved playing in it.

Cal was more interested in the tide pools on the rocks than the beach today and spent all of his time there.

We saw some vendors offering tattoos and hair wraps so we let the kids get some.

Then we went to dinner and took the kids back to the apartment. Nole and I went for a sunset walk.

Enough steps already!

We were supposed to stay two nights in Saint-Malo but we decided to give up one night here in order to see all of the sites we want to see in Brittany and Normandy and to avoid excess driving.