Nantes and Bordeaux here we come – not helped by a nationwide train strike

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on 23^rd February 2024. We have just arrived back at Le Shack. Our journey back from the UK was a convoluted one – let me share it with you!

It’s 10 o’clock at night and our ferry has just docked at Ouistreham near Caen in France. We are home! Instead of getting back to Le Shack as fast as we can, which is what we usually do, we have decided this time to break the journey, spending two nights in Nantes and one in Bordeaux. However our most pressing need at the moment is to find our hotel tonight, carefully chosen so that it is not too far from the ferry terminal. I question whether a twenty minute walk with heavy rucksacks is close enough but Michael gives me one of those looks so off we trek.

Our hotel is part of a budget chain, and one of the ways they keep costs down is for the check-in to be automated. We squeeze ourselves and our luggage into the tiny vestibule and wait patiently while the man in front of us stares in perplexed frustration at the screen.

‘I’m getting too old for this sort of thing,’ he says. ‘I need a code for the door but it doesn’t want to give it to me.’

After a bit of mutual head scratching we work it out together and before long we are tapping the code into the key pad outside our room. It’s functional, as you might expect for the price, but clean and with a large bed, and we are asleep within minutes.

We had already booked tickets for the train to Nantes the next morning, approx 3 hours away, but fell foul of a nationwide train strike and so from this point on things begin to get complicated. The precise details of which trains would be affected by the strike was not announced until the day before we were due to travel. The dates had been deliberately picked to coincide with the beginning of the school holidays, and had infuriated many people in France as it ruined their plans. It also threatened to ruin our plans because our options turned out to be very limited.

As it was a Sunday there were no buses. We looked at hire cars but they wanted 200€ for the pleasure of a one-day hire which didn’t fill us with enthusiasm.

A last-minute solution turned out to be car-sharing, booked on-line through BlaBlaCar. A young lady called Melanie was heading our way and was happy to offer us a lift for what turned out to be half the price of the train fare. However we had to get to a specified point to meet her, 12 km away, and thankfully even Michael thought this was too far to walk. Uber taxis came to our rescue, another on-line booking via their App, one that actually allowed us to track our driver’s journey so that we could see what time he left and whether he would be on schedule.

Melanie turned up on time, accompanied by a young lad who was also going our way. Everyone has a profile in this digital age, and the BlaBla profile for Melanie informed us that she was 29 years old and ‘chatty’. As it turned out she’d been to a party the night before and so wasn’t feeling very talkative, but a groggy head didn’t slow her down. We shot down to Nantes at top speed.

Another short walk and we took a tram to our Airbnb, an apartment close to the city centre, and yet another automated check-in. We had one code for the outer courtyard, another code for the door to our group of flats. After we’d heaved our rucksacks up four flights of stairs (no lift – mental note to self to get a ground floor flat next time) we had to call the owner who then remotely operated the lock on the door to the flat and let us in. A set of keys had been left inside for our use during our stay.

Feeling exhausted yet? We certainly were! How things have changed over the last ten years. And so to bed.

Finally, we get to the good bit. Exploring Nantes, which turned out to be worth all the bother of getting there. It has all the usual attractions of a city – museums, churches and grand buildings but there were two visitor attractions that we particularly wanted to see. The first was the botanic gardens, the fourth largest in France, and despite it being the depths of winter, when gardens don’t always look at their best, it was stunning.

This next picture was found by chance as we bought some food for dinner that evening.

The magnificent fellow below was the main reason for our visit. This mechanical elephant is the most well-known of the weird and wonderful creatures to be found at the Machines de l’Île. You can get a sense of the size of him from the people on the ground to the left of the picture. He actually moves, and has the capacity to carry 50 people on his back.

We had hoped to visit on Sunday afternoon but the train strike delayed us and we arrived too late. On Monday it was shut, but at least we managed to see him. We’ll have to visit another time so I can indulge my inner child and ride on a giant wooden elephant as it plods along the wide city boulevard.

After two nights in Nantes it was time for another tram ride out to a bus depot where a FlixBus would take us on our next leg, down to Bordeaux. On arrival we dumped our bags at yet another hotel and headed straight out as we had only one afternoon here and there was something in particular that we wanted to see.

Below you can see the Bassin des Lumières, which was a German submarine base during the Second World War. It had the capacity to hold 32 submarines but today four of these cavernous docking pools have been converted into France’s largest digital art display, a unique son et lumière show on a grand scale.

It was very dark inside so the videos below are a little dim but they give you an idea. The theme was Van Gogh and whilst the sound track might sound like we were in a zoo it was actually the sound of children screaming with glee as they ran about – the joys of half-term week.

Apologies for the videos being a little difficult to see – if you are interested it is worth having a look at their website.

And so we came to our last day, and another train ride (rail strike over – until the next one) from Bordeaux to Tarbes, and a final short bus ride to where we had booked a hire car to get us back home. We counted up all the different forms of travel we had used over the last few days – trains, ferry, trams, national and local buses, a water bus in Nantes, BlaBlaCar, Uber Ride and a hire car. Quite a list.

Each time we travel we learn what works well and what needs to be tweaked.

I have come to the conclusion that if I never see my rucksack again I shall be a happy woman! It’s not too bad once it is on my back, although by the time I get to the end of one of Michaels ‘short’ walks of several kilometres I am bent over like one of the seven dwarfs. It is the lifting it up and down that threatens to pop my spine out of alignment. Combine that with the fact that I am a danger to public health on crowded trams and buses as I can’t turn round without clobbering the person unlucky enough to be standing next to me. It is time to buy luggage with wheels, something I can push or pull along with just my little finger.

However timetables and schedules are now a distant memory. After so many weeks away I find I am deeply happy to be home. The daffodils are out in the garden, the sun is shining, albeit briefly as rain and gales are forecast, and our little cabin waits for us, a peaceful haven in a busy and rather exhausting world.

See you soon.

MJ