We came back from Paris before Bastille Day and decided to spent it on the Atlantic coast, in the fam­ily house. This is where I spent most of my sum­mers as a kid and a teen and I hadn’t been back there since 2002. At the time, I was com­ing back from Aus­tralia and New Zealand and I had spent the entire sum­mer almost locked in a room try­ing to study for my uni­ver­sity exams the fol­low­ing September.

This is a sleepy vil­lage 45 min­utes from Nantes. Its claim to fame is the cookie fac­tory. Other than that, there isn’t much: a round­about (French love round­abouts and even the small­est vil­lage has one), a church, a bar-tabac (a small cor­ner store) and a news agent. I both loved and hated the place as a teen. The beach is only a few min­utes’ walk from the house and going there is fun, yet it gets very lonely after a while. Sum­mer seemed to stretch for­ever: between going to the mar­ket and bik­ing to the news agent to buy a mag­a­zine once in a while, there wasn’t much to do. I’m the old­est kid in the fam­ily and my sis­ter, the sec­ond old­est, is 6 years younger than me. I spent entire evenings shout­ing at a bunch of kids (brother, sis­ter, cousins…) who kept on sneak­ing into my room and yet I was bored at the grownups table at din­ner time.

This was like a blast from the past for me. Feng and I didn’t have a car so we had to walk every­where, like when I was a teen. Because nobody lives in the house full-time, there is no T.V and no Inter­net con­nec­tion. I found most of the mag­a­zines I had left the last time I was there, eight years ago. I found my old swim­suit and my old posters. I found peace and quiet.

The coast had been badly dam­aged by TotalFina’s Erica oil spill in 1999 but lit­tle remains of the dis­as­ter today. I remem­ber, at the time, there were pools of oils washed upon the shore and it looked like it would never be clean again. I guess ten years have passed…

You can fol­low our French trip here on Flickr: France (2010).

Local Cook­ies

Ne Pas Stationner

St Michel Beach

Bastille day Fire­works on the Beach

Bastille day Fire­works on the Beach

Streets in Pornic	Tall Trees
Boats at Low Tide	Nam­ing Boats
Trees at Sunset	Cas­tle in Pornic

Por­nic

Famous Ice Cream Shop

Related posts:

1. On The Way To France
2. Snow Sculp­tures And Win­ter Fun
3. Above Ground
4. The Great Wall (万里长城)
5. Nantes’ Ele­phant