Day 11 & Day 12 - Nantes

Yes we wanted to spend our tenth wedding anniversary in Paris. I know it's a cliche but we love the city, the people, the feel of Paris - it's not just the city of romance but a city of pure life. But we had another destination in mind in France, a place we'd only heard of in legend and YouTube videos - Les Machines de L'ile at Nantes.

Basically we wanted to go to Nantes to ride in an elephant.

This elephant.

 This is what it looks like in motion.

Llyn also went for a ride on a mechanical heron (a prototype for a new project - The Heron Tree - which is due for completion in 2018) and we saw their mechanical caterpillar.

Here's the caterpillar in motion

The next day we returned for a ride on their Verne inspired carousal.

Here are some more of the amazing sights from Les Machines de L'Ile

It's like a Terry Gilliam redesign of Disneyland. Nantes is the home town of Jules Verne and like Verne it had a delightful confluence of the past and the future. We tried to get to the Jules Verne museum but, like so much of Nantes, it was closed on Tuesday (or Dimarche as I know now to look for. ) An anticlimax to the titanic struggle Llyn had with her natural enemy, a steep flight of stairs. Today we wandered up the road to the Cathedral of St Pierre and St Paul - a building that survived fire, revolution and the explosion of a nearby Jacobin arsenal.

Said arsenal was part of the Chateau Duc d'Bretagne where we wandered the ramparts overlooking the rest of Nantes before being absorbed by the museum. The museum not only covered the history of the original inhabitants of the Chateau but the history of Nantes itself, and we found we had run our of time as we wanted to ride on the carousel.


Tomorrow, we're off to Blois but we're already planning our return to Nantes.