Back in the US, we had a collection of vintage train travel posters with scenes from the UK and France. Our goal was to visit all of these places and given that they were sponsored by railway companies, it was easy enough to do.  From John o’ Groats at the top of Scotland to Land’s End at the bottom of England we went. While our estimate is that we’ve been to 400 French villages, towns, and cities, we had never managed to make it to the town you see featured in the poster here in this paragraph. If you’re looking at the coastline of the Côte d’Azur, names like Nice and Cannes probably sound familiar but perhaps not Agay—until you discover who wrote a famous novel and visited there often.

When we were looking for a place to call “home” in France, we had a spreadsheet that included must-have items such as, “train station, market town, supermarkets, seaside…” As often happens, compromises are made, so “must-have” turned into “nice-to-have” for that waterfront location. Carcassonne does have a river and a canal but we’re still 50 km (31 miles) from the sea. Consequently, when we have the opportunity to vacation on the coast, Bill tries to find an accommodation that provides that outlook that we sought for our house. Today’s featured photo above across the top shows you the view that he found. Not bad at all!

It’s hard to miss a structure that towers 60 meters (197 feet) above you and stretches left and right as far as the eye can see. You can get an idea of the size of the viaduct in Morlaix in the photo above across the top of today’s blog post. We initially scheduled a visit there as just an overnight stop on our circular rail trip around Brittany. However, our map route changed when we tried to book trains with guaranteed seat reservations. The schedules forced us to backtrack to Rennes first. Rather than rushing through, we turned this quirk into an advantage by extending our stay in Morlaix to several nights, using it as a base to explore nearby Brest via a local train and Roscoff by bus.

If you are a fan of the bicycle race, Le Tour de France, you will have heard it referred to as La Grande Boucle or in English, The Big Loop. Although these days the race doesn’t necessarily make a geographic circle, sometimes even starting in another country, it did indeed complete a grand circuit around France when it was created in 1903. About every two years the riders pass through Carcassonne so we get to see them regularly—as long as you count a two-second glimpse as they all whiz by as “seeing” them! Using that concept of a big circular trip, we’ve just returned from our own grand tour by train around Brittany.