24. Dinan Museum and Awesome Bar Band!

What an unexpectedly cool day! We got up late, cause it is vacation and we don’t have to get up early if we don’t want to.  We got some breakfast and set out for the Dinan Chateau Museum…another place we’d put off seeing for too long. 

It is in the big castle keep just behind the Tourist Information office. We headed in and found that mostly the museum required a lot of circular stair climbing and descending. Lynn handled it with super aplomb; her broken ankle is strong like bull! Anyhow, we climbed to the top of the keep, looking at the displays in several rooms along the way. Most impressive of the displays was the art room, with paintings of Dinan from over 100 years ago, showing the same scenes we love of “our” wall of the ramparts. Beautiful that artists from long ago saw the same scenes that have so captivated us our entire stay.

We made it to the top of the keep and checked out Dinan from on high, then headed down to the lowest dungeon under another part of the rampart to see the sarcophagus display. For some reason, they have a lot of sculptures of dead notable people, taken from their tombs somewhere else, and placed in a dank dark dungeon room way underground. Hmmmmm. 

Lynn wasn’t going to give up til we saw the sarcophagi, so we worked our way down the dark stairs and checked em out. Lovely! My favorite part of the visit was the fire department! They were conducting training on the ladder truck against the castle wall. We told them our grandson Jack loved firemen and trucks, so they were happy to have us take pictures of the rigs. 

Lunch was at our favorite restaurant in Dinan, Le Cantorbury, then we headed to grocery shop at Monoprix, the answer to every “where do I buy necessary stuff?” question in France. They sell clothes, Xerox copies, school supplies, and everything else on the bottom, and groceries and sundries on the second floor. We stocked up and headed home. Later, during our relaxation stop at Pub St. Sauveur, the Basilica bells started their  7:00pm pealing, so I caught it on video while watching a restored classic Citroen back out of a parking space…it seemed pretty cool at the time! 

We ate a light supper of fruit and sandwich at our favorite spot, the English Garden, then headed to another local bar to figure out a mystery: There’s a bar downstairs from the rear of our apartment. Almost every night, it’s hopping pretty loud, sometimes with terrible music. We wanted to find out if they do crummy karaoke or what, so walked over. WHAT A SURPRISE! There was a live band kicking hard inside the tiny bar space, and they were so cool! We jammed in and got a beer to watch. They are pretty much indescribable, so I took some video’s you can check if you like. All I can say is: wash-tub string bass, bowed saw blade, clarinet, squeeze box, guitar and suitcase drum, with loud expressive singing in French that NOBODY could understand! We loved them! 

At their break, we talked at length to a girl and her boyfriend who knew the band. They are street musicians from Belgium, which explains the expressive performances. We paid our tab, and went out to talk to the musicians – fantastic!~  The wash-tub bass was a PLASTIC trash tub, which the owner WISHED was the typical American galvanized steel product. The guys were so fun to talk to, and getting jazzed for another set later. I might go back down!

PIC captions: We are FINALLY going to the museum!
                      Lynn checks out the sarcophagi in the  dungeon.
                           Firemen save the castle.
                            Awesome bar band behind our apartment!

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2011 Dinan and Paris French Adventure