Dinard and Cancale
Château des Deux Rives, apartment in Dinard, photo from the rental website.
Dinard
A few days after the conclusion of our delightful workshop with Gail Rieke, we left for the Brittany coast to meet up with some of our best friends from California, Cass and Billy. They had rented an apartment in one of the most beautiful spots on the coast of Dinard and invited us to join them. We had stayed in this same apartment with them two years ago and all of us were anxious to relive that most extraordinary experience. We had been planning and anticipating it since almost immediately after the last time we were there in 2022. The Château des Deux Rives is a mansion built in 1878 by the wonderfully named Count Joseph Dahdah on a point of land jutting out into the Bay of St. Malo and offering a view of more than 180º of coastline.
The house which was once the primary residence of Count Dahdah is now divided into several apartments, and the one we rented is on the upper most floor with breathtaking vistas from every single window. Dinard has been a resort for the rich and famous, especially the British for about 100 years. It was Count Dahdah himself who is considered the most prominent developer of the city, building over 100 homes, large buildings in town and developing a ferry between St. Malo and Dinard. Many extravagant villas dot the cliffs around the coast but none has a better location than the one where we stayed.
Morning has broken in Dinard. View from our bedroom window.
There is lots to do and plenty to see on the coast of Brittany if Dinard is your base, but the beauty of staying in this apartment is that you don’t need to go anywhere or do anything other than look out the windows to enjoy a remarkably relaxing time. So if it’s raining, or if you’re tired or lack the ambition to get up and out, sitting around is a viable option. We did a certain amount of that.
The front bedroom, attached to the living room has a beautiful panoramic view of the Bay of St. Malo and the Dinard Beach.
If you have followed this blog for awhile, you may remember that Rick and I spent 5 months in Dinard during the second pandemic lock-down in 2020. Our rental was west of the Pointe du Moulinet where the Château des Deux Rives is located, in St. Enogat, the original fishing village from which Dinard developed. It is around the point pictured below, between the first and second promontories. The third point is known as Pointe du Décolle in Saint-Lunaire. All along the coast is a walking path which allows you, if the tide is not too high, to walk for miles along this stunning coastline. I find it hard to think of a more delightful place in all the world than the Dinard coast, especially at this time of year when most of the tourists have gone home and the weather has cooled, but is still very pleasant.
The rocky coast in full of interest. The bay includes a number of islands.
Tides in the Bay of St. Malo are some of the most dramatic on the planet. They are definitely the highest tides in Europe. The water can recede to the point where it feels you could almost walk between Dinard and St. Malo, and they can swell to swallow the beaches entirely and crash against the cliffs creating gigantic waves, sometimes flooding parts of St. Malo itself. It makes for quite an exciting spectacle from the safety of one of the beautiful homes along the shoreline. The highest tides, where the coefficient can reach 120, happen once every few years, but every year there are several quite dramatic tides in conjunction with lunar cycles.
Just below where we stayed is a natural tidal swimming pool. When the tide is out you can approach it from the backside along the beach. When the tide is up you have to enter from shore.
View from the kitchen window down to the swimming pool at high tide.
Out our window we could watch the Bay change its shape, the water coming or going, and enjoy the changing skies as well. We stayed this time for a week and none of us every grew complacent about the view. When Rick and I lived in St. Enogat for six months we never tired of looking out our windows either. It is an ever changing, never disappointing perspective on this amazing earth we live upon.
We found ourselves running to the windows several times a day to take in the changing vistas.
Cass and Billy love St. Malo. They have come back again and again to that city since they first discovered it some years ago. Of course we also enjoy St. Malo and have many memories of family vacations spent there. One thing I really enjoy about Dinard is that you can, at least from the part of Dinard where we stayed, glimpse St. Malo across the Bay. You can also walk down to a water taxi that will take you speeding across the Bay and deliver you to the shores of St. Malo, which does, by our reckoning, have some of the nicest restaurants in the area. From Dinard, if you go by land, it is a few minutes drive over a dam at the mouth of the Rance River, just as it enters the Atlantic. We went to St. Malo twice and had two very good meals there.
St. Malo across the Bay, filled with boats of every kind.
Although Dinard itself is a pleasant town, with a casino and charming places to shop, we haven’t felt inspired to spend much time there and haven’t discovered too many great places to eat. It does, however, have the best fish market that we’ve ever visited, and going there was on our to-do list. On one of our last days in town we went to the fish market to buy dinner but instead of coming home with fresh sea bass, we bought lamb instead. This area is known for its agneau de prés salés, which gets its name from the salt marshes on which the sheep are raised, making for a very tender and flavorful cut of meat.
There are so many attractive homes in Dinard built during the 19th century. The town has retained this aspect, with not much new building to spoil the atmosphere.
Cancale
One of the things Cass was anticipating from this trip was the taste of Cancale oysters. She made it a point to have at least a few every day she was in residence, and we were more than happy to accompany her. Of course, you can buy Cancale oysters at any market or restaurant on the Brittany coast, but why not go directly to the source, which is what we did as one of our first outings. On a gray Sunday morning we hopped into the car and drove the 30 minutes up the coast to join a horde or other locals, visitors and tourists all descending upon Cancale for their Sunday meal at the exact same time. It was surprisingly crowded!
Oyster beds in Cancale at low tide. Oysters are generally farmed.
We were lucky enough to follow our noses to a particularly nice little place for our own lunch, which began, of course, with a platter of the local specialité.
Oysters fresh from the sea for lunch.
Afterwards we strolled down to the pier where the daily oyster market is located. I have certainly visited it before several times, but I’d never actually bought any. This time we did. We got 3 dozen to carry back to Dinard to satisfy our temporary oyster habit for the following three days. Apparently you can keep an oyster for up to eight days, but of course the fresher the better. We got a dozen of the Plates de Bretagne also known as Belon, small, round and flat and cultivated in deep water, the Fines de Claires, which are refined in clay tubs, called claires, in shallow water close to the shore, giving the oysters a particular flavor influenced by the land, and a dozen Huîtres Creuses.
Rick visits each vendor before choosing which one to patronize.
The apartment has a very nice kitchen with an extravagant painted tile wall above the kitchen sink and black granite counters. We fell into the rhythm of having a nice lunch out and then cooking something up for dinner. Playing cards and Mah Jong before and after meals.
We received our purchased oysters in a plastic bag, but we were advised, once home, to lay them flat on a plate to preserve their liquid.
We were gone from home for almost two weeks, and visited many picturesque locations. I’ll take you on a tour of some lovely sites over the next several weeks. I took lots of photos!