Friday, July 15, 2011

12. Lynn is 60 tomorrow!!!

No big plans today, just hanging around Dinan and celebrating Lynn’s 60th birthday! This makes the trip even more special, cause we’re celebrating her retirement, her birthday, AND Mandi’s birthday too (who was born exactly 35 years ago today on her Mom’s birthday). We’d intended to go out for a special supper, but changed ideas while reading some of our Brittany books. Now, we’ve spent the day planning a 5-day rental car trip around some of the interesting Brittany sites not available to us on foot or bike. Lynn’s established a general itinerary, and I’ve been finding out about renting a car here (looks like we can get a diesel Renault Twingo!!!!). We ate lunch at a local spot (galettes, a heavier crepe, getting tired of them, frankly), and decided to make a picnic supper for tonight, and just eat at our favorite park down the block. Our birthday celebration will be the road trip; haven’t seen any birthday cakes or cake mixes so none of that tonight.

We DID buy one special present today for Lynn’s birthday. The town had a sidewalk sale today, so we spoke to a guy outside the bookstore, seated at a table of books, to ask directions. It turned out he was an author, and the books stacked around him were ones he wrote all about Brittany, and one was about Dinan history and pictures. Peter Meazey is a delightful British expatriate, married to a Dinan lady and living here for 32 years. He told us the story about why our favorite park down the street is named “The English Garden”…it was (arguably) the first garden made with low-cut grass and boxes of growing flowers in an relatively small enclosed area ever. All because of the invention of the lawn mower by an Englishman in 1840…I think. Anyway we bought a book which he autographed for Lynn with a birthday greeting, and let us take a pic.
Just got back from our picnic supper at our favorite park, wonderful scenery across the valley to an old Abbey and woods. A nice local lady took our picture in front of a beautiful garden gate with flowers and green stuff all around. Lynn’s 60th portrait!

 
No other news to report. We hung around close to home all day, expecting someone to come repair the internet connection in the building…but now no one is coming until next Monday (everyone has a low opinion of France Telecomm – kind of like we feel about Comcast, I bet). So, back to our favorite wifi pub down the block tonight, to post this stuff to the internet blog. Whew, if this keeps up we’ll come back addicted to kirs and local beer! Thanks for reading this stuff, we are having fun doing it and writing our diary.

HOW EMBARRASSING: we just realized TOMORROW is Lynn's birthday...confused us when they showed the Bastille Day fireworks a day early! Well, no harm in celebrating 2 days in a row!

PIC captions: Lynn's birthday portrait, at gate in "our" English Garden
                      Our favorite Dinan author Peter Meazy with Lynn for her birthday.
                       Lynn's birthday breakfast from our favorite boulangerie!
CLICK here for all photos and vids:
2011 Dinan and Paris French Adventure

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