St, Michel-Chef-Chef

Thursday 4th September

Left Montjean this morning, driving straight onto the yellow road on the map following the south bank of the river.  This part of the river is very attractive, partly because it is so wide that it splits into several narrower streams.  We stopped for 11-ses at one of these lovely spots near Champtoceaux.

 Soon after this, though, we reached the end of tranquility - we were suddenly on the Nantes bypass and Traffic!  One of the roundabouts had a huge Auchan, so we bought some more supplies of food to see us through our last week in France.  And so we headed for the Atlantic coast ... aiming for the delightful sounding St. Michel-Chef-Chef.  So as yet, we haven't seen the estuary of the Loire - we'll do that when we leave here.  We are at a small campsite just across a minor road from the sea with tall ancient pine trees to give us shade from the very hot sun.  This evening was low tide and we walked on the sand, paddled in the shallow water and sat on a seat watching the sun set - such a great experience watching the unobscured sun disappear into the sea.  We don't think we've seen such a perfect one since we were in New Zealand.

Friday 5th September

We are chilling out here, so not so much to report, but we did discover why this village is so called.  We were just going to the boulangerie for a baguette, but across the road from there we spotted an interesting shop called Les Delices de St.Michel.
 

 That sounded like food, so we went in.  Wow - what a display of galettes (biscuits), cakes and other yummy, tempting stuff.  This company was started by Joseph Grellier in 1906, a master patissier whose wife thought it would be a good idea to try and sell his unique biscuits to the rich Parisennes who came to the seaside.  It took off and now there are 7 factories producing St. Michel biscuits and cakes.  We've bought enough of them for everyone to try some when we get back!  Anyway, in the shop was an information board that explained all this and had a section headed "Pourquoi Chef Chef?"  At one time the village was called St. Michel de Chevecier.  A chevecier was the "dignitaire" of a convent or abbey.  There were many of them in this region.  The Chevecier-Chef was the principal at St.Michel and so that became the name of where he lived.  Then the name gradually got shortened to St. Michel-Chef-Chef! As the board said - Et Voila!

Chilling out later meant a lazy swim in the heated, covered pool - John enjoyed it too, but he'd just got out when he took the photo(!) and a cycle along the seafront to see the little harbour and have a lie on the beach for a while.  There are lots of these fishing huts on stilts along here - we've seen them before around Brittany.  Today we watched one actually being used - The large net is lowered by counterbalance and left on the seabed, then raised some time later, hopefully with a catch.  The one in the photo did hook something out of the big net with an ordinary fishing net, but we don't know what it was.