Henri and I kissed our host good-bye, told her it would be genial to see her again, and vousvoied her one last time regarding her gentillesse before leaving Dinard for the 4½-hour drive back to Paris.

We would be in Paris in about six, actually, because we stopped to visit the town of Dinan, a 20-minute drive from Dinard inland along the Rance River. Due to their proximity and the similarity of their names, no one who lives outside of Brittany can ever remember which is Dinard and which is Dinan. Dinard is the resort town along the coast; Dinan is the medieval town that’s inland. An easier way to remember is that Dinard is the place you go because your rich friends tell you to while Dinan is the place you go because your guidebook tells you to.

Henri and I had really been looking forward to going to Dinan, he because the ramparts of Dinan speak volumes about the efforts of the Duchy of Brittany to remain independent of the French Crown, I because I thought I could get an interesting article out of it.

The Blue Guide I had brought along calls it “one of the most beautiful towns in Brittany.” The dark stone towns of Brittany do indeed have a brutal beauty and a medieval timeliness. And Dinan’s old town is so well preserved, along with intact ramparts and a view of the Rance River, that it’s easy to understand why the guidebooks speak so highly of it. But Henri and I were both disappointed.

Henri wouldn’t say he was disappointed since failing to appreciate a town that was graced by a duke is bad for his self-esteem as it calls into question the very essence of his aspirations to live like one. But I could tell he wasn’t into the place because he only asked me once to take his picture, and in that picture, standing on a rampart overlooking the Rance (the view in this photo), his expression is as hard and cold as the very stone of those ramparts.

Perhaps it was the change of weather—after 48 hours of luxuriously clear skies the clouds of northwest France suddenly arrived. (Note the difference between the top photo and the others.) But it may actually have been the town itself at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in September.

The old streets themselves felt like a weekend winding down, with stale kouign-amans (carmelized milkbread cakes) and fars bretons (pudding cakes) in the bakery windows, the sidestreets empty, and people milling about the main streets in the hopes that the old stones would tell them something about their past or perhaps about the direction of their lives, but the stones had nothing to say but “go home.”

It’s times like this when you realize that your guidebook can only take you so far and that the rest is up to you.

Forty-eight hours may not sound like a lot of travel, but it was indeed time to go home. We had a four-hour drive ahead of us. Before leaving we stopped for a drink a café on a grand old square that’s now mostly a vast parking lot. Our table was near an equestrian statue of Bertrand du Guesclin, a 14th-century warrior and nobleman from Brittany. Henri tried to tell me about the man but either his heart wasn’t in it or he really didn’t know himself why the guy deserved a statue in Dinan.

In any case I took the wheel and steered us onto the highway and didn’t let go, except to get gas, until I dropped myself off in front of my door. Henri made a feeble attempt to have me drive him home and return the car myself in the morning, but it was too late for negotiations.

Post Script
Six weeks after we returned from our trip to Brittany Henri called to say that a speeding ticket had arrived in the mail. One of us had been driving 57 km (35 mi.) per hour in a 50 km (31 mi) per hour zone—that one of us being me. It had happened on our way to Brittany, near Fougères. I’d suspected at the time if I’d been flashed by the radar post but I hadn’t said anything because Henri was sleeping at the time, and rather than disturb his peace, as well as my own, while driving through one of those plane-tree bordered routes that make driving in the French countryside so pleasant and dangerous, I’d continued on.

I naturally told him that I would pay the ticket—90 euros, about $135, argh!—but Henri would have none of that. He insisted on paying half. He’d received the ticket as the one whose credit card and address we’d used in renting the car, which also meant that the was the one to get the points deduced from his license. I offered to plead guilty to the authorities so as to restore his points, but Henri declined, saying that ever since he got rid of his car last year he doesn’t drive much anyway.

Gotta hand it to Henri, the man knows proper etiquette.

Henri and I had never taken a road trip together, so we had no way of knowing how compatible we would be in deciding which towns and sights to visit along the way and where to stop for lunch or coffee or even a pee.

But we’d both been invited to a party in Dinard, in Brittany, so we decided to rent a car in Paris and do some visiting along the way.

Between car rental, gas, and tolls, a Paris/Brittany round-trip can cost about the same as a week in a 5-star hotel in Tunisia, flight included, but Henri and I found a comparatively decent price with an agency called Rent-a-Car-with-One-Taillight-Missing. The car came with a quarter tank of gas, which may or may not have been what the guy meant when he told us that we were getting an upgrade.

Anyway, the car moved and Henri managed to avoid getting us crunched by a bus (i.e. he almost got us crunched by a bus), so by the time we made it out of Paris I wasn’t worried about compatibility so much as survival.

Dinard is just past Saint Malo, which is just past Le Mont Saint Michel, so we had a choice between the north route going through Normandy or the southern route going past Chartres and Le Mans. Henri didn’t care as long as there was a palace to visit along the way—all Henri wants to do is visit palaces—so I decided that we would take the southern route and told him to pull off the toll road at La Ferté Bernard.

La Ferté Bernard doesn’t have a palace. It doesn’t have much of anything, to tell the truth, but part of the interest of a road trip is to stop where there isn’t much of anything, otherwise it isn’t a road trip but an itinerary. Henri only agreed to stop at La Ferté Bernard because I told him that something really important had happened there in the 15th century. Being French he couldn’t stand the idea that I might know something about his country that he doesn’t.

La Ferté Bernard is a very nice town as far as towns with nothing to see go. Its main attraction is the church Notre-Dame-des-Marais that’s a mix of flamboyant Gothic and let’s just finish the damn thing. I took the picture of the scribe (above) there.

There’s also a late-15th-century entrance gate to the old town, below left, where Henri stopped complaining about the lack of a palace at La Ferté Bernard long enough to pose. Henri’s face is not normally as blurred as in these photos but you really don’t want to see his expression here. I also got him to pose on the other side of the gate, below right, without him seeing that I’d placed by a sign that says “I’m waiting for my master.”

One of the nicest things about La Ferté Bernard is that at lunchtime, when the streets are deserted, you can have a pee by a plane tree without worrying about passersby.

La Ferté Bernard is only a few miles off the A11 toll road, so it was well worth the 30-minutes stop, though we didn’t realize at the time that in addition to paying something like 200 euros to get off the toll road we had to pay another 200 to get back on.

By now we were getting hungry so we took a vote as to where we should stop for lunch. Henri voted for a quick lunch at a rest stop so that we would have plenty of time in the afternoon to visit palaces. I voted for Laval, which is an actual town where I told him there was lots to see. We went to Laval, not because my argument was so convincing but because I was driving.

Laval, as far as we could tell, is famous for having parking unimeters so far from most of the parking spaces that you risk getting a ticket during the 10 minutes it takes you to find it.

We had lunch on the terrace of a brasserie by the River Mayenne facing the ramparts and fortress castle that define the old town. I don’t care much for omelets but I ordered one anyway because road trips are for eating things you don’t normally eat (I’ll tell you sometime about my meal at Shoney’s when driving through South Carolina last April.) I regretted the omelet as soon as it arrived, but the view was indeed quite nice from where we sat, the sun was out, and Henri tends to complain less when he’s eating.

We then headed into Brittany through less traveled roads so as to visit Fougères, which actually does have a palace. Well, sort of. It’s actually a fortress-castle, half in ruins, but Henri bounded from the car as though we’d just entered an oasis after three days in a cultural desert.

Like other fortress-castles on the former border between the Duchy of Brittany and the Kingdom of France, the castle was built, rebuilt, and refortified from the 12th through 14th centuries at a time when Brittany when trying to stave off advances by the French kings with the Normans lurking nearby. Between the castle and the under-visited town nearby, Fougères is a great introduction to the growth and medieval history of France and to the slate and schist that defines Brittany’s architecture as well as a great example of the pleasures of traveling in off the main tourist paths, even with Henri for company.

Actually, Henri’s mood had changed by the time we cross the drawbridge into the castle complex. He was now in full, Euro-cultured glory. It’s quite amazing to see how connected Europeans feel at times to the full length of their national and continental history. At most, even well-educated Americans will connect to only a portion of their history—for example, the “In God We Trust” part or the free market part or the pioneering part or the immigrant part or the I-can-eat-pray-etc-anyway-I-want part—but Europeans, particularly when they have a diploma or two on their CV, have a way of embracing their entire past no matter how obscure it may appear.

We were lucky enough to have arrived shortly before a guided tour was setting out. The guide gathered together the entire crowd of visitors that afternoon. There were three of us: me, Henri, and a woman who looked like she was trying to escape a bad marriage only to realize that the ruins of an old fortress were not the answer. But for Henri this was the answer. He was now in ecstasy.

Here is a glimpse of Henri’s smile against a backdrop of the Château de Fougères.