Nantes, FR

Days 2-5

We’d originally booked three nights in Nantes, but soon added a couple more. Rett’s tweaked knee from the inbound ride was quickly improving, but it needed some recovery from whatever strange trauma had briefly affected it, and doing one of our patented day-long city-exploration walks with only one rest day before getting back on the bikes would not be wise.

Plus, the roughly-estimated route to get us to Morocco within our 90-day EU visa window had required a 19.1 mile-per-day average when we left Paris, and our 11-day run down the Loire had actually reduced that to 17.6 miles upon our arrival in Nantes. So even with two extra “zero days”, it would only float back up 18.8, keeping us still slightly ahead of the game. Somehow this is the first time in 5 years where we’ve been constrained enough by immigration rules (rather than the seasons, desire to move to another country, etc.) that I’ve felt the need to come up with this rough tracking method. It hasn’t been a source of pressure (at least not yet, with our window still 2/3rds open!), and it’s an extremely loose target, but it at least feels like a useful sanity check to have around.

On our 2nd-to-last day we walked, beginning eastward back towards the center along the north bank of the Loire. My planned route unintentionally coincided with a green line painted on the sidewalks, a predetermined tourist path, which I guess means I did a good job, though one I didn’t need to do at all?

More-traditional in form than much of Nantes’s public art, yet still rather badass and boundary-pushing.

#FindRett on the stairs down to “Le Jardín Extraordinaire”, a recent urban redevelopment that remade an old quarry into something pretty and fun, including a popular “Via Ferrarta” where dozens of people were working their way up, down, and along the cliff walls.

We’re now inside the bluff-top “bird’s nest” we rode under on our way into Nantes (officially titled “Belvédère de l’Hermitage”). Some cyclists riding the other direction are illustrating the space we get on the high-quality waterfront route.

Looking across to Île de Nantes, the island in the middle of the Loire. We would visit the carousel later, but never quite got around to viewing one of the most-famous art installations, the line of light-up colored rings (now unlit, running along the waterfront in the foreground).

It seems like this is a setup for a real-life optical illusion or other trickery, but no, this street really does progressively narrow to just a person-wide exit.

This fancy old-school shopping mall had a Harry Potter store inside one of these glass-fronted spaces, likely the world’s most-appropriate setting for a Harry Potter store outside of a Universal theme park.

The Château des ducs de Bretagne wasn’t on Rett’s list, but it was a pretty cool moated fortress where you can walk around the ramparts for free (and it had much-needed public toilet!)

This church has a rather insane cake-topper.

After a lot of lunch-indecision, we finally settled on the low-end, a kebab/burger/taco place, where we were both glad that we didn’t order the strange burrito-slash-panini things that the French apparently call “tacos”. Then finally we crossed (halfway) over the river, to the main event: Les Machines de l’Île. “I’Ile” is “the isle”, referring to the Isle of Nantes that sits in the middle of the Loire, and “Machines” is…Machines! Living in an old industrial zone, they’re a set of steampunk mechanical artworks created by a group of French wackos with grand ideas.

Rett hates spiders, but for some reason she was happy to climb inside this moving Shelob-sized one to help operate it (the other three operators are professionals).

The animatronic spider takes Rett high in the air.

A couple of other volunteers help fly the mechanical heron.

In spirit, it reminded me very much of the Redmoon Theater group in Chicago that once-upon-a-time staged large-scale inventive events overflowing with wonder. In fact, it felt inexplicably like a direct trans-Atlantic response to Redmoon’s 2015 letter that announced their closing: “There is no funding model for this civic and social artistic vision. We’ve innovated new models to support our unique artistic vision. But, quite simply and quite sadly – our innovations haven’t been able to keep up with our civic goals”. Here in France, they said “Au contraire! Just get your city to give you millions of your dollars to support our vision! Are you Americans are so poor you cannot afford that?!” Because that’s what’s happened in Nantes, and while I have no idea if they currently operate at a profit, that seed money at least allowed them to reach a point where they now get a steady daily income from tourists like us buying tickets to their exhibitions (something Redmoon never came close to achieving). In short, the Redmoon guys would probably cry if they knew about Les Machines de l’île.

The standout creation, “Le Grand Éléphant”, is exactly that: an enormous mechanical elephant that actually “walks” around the neighborhood. It’s clearly inspired by the Oliphaunts/Mûmakil from Lord of the Rings, and we could be like the Haradrim, riding atop (and, uh, inside) the giant creature!

Holy shit, there’s a giant elephant stomping through this town!

Since it just walks on public paths, you can get a pretty good experience with the elephant without paying anything.

The elephant walks its loop in 3 segments, our ride was Segment #3, loading up via the airplane stairway, and ending at his home “garage”.

For the groundlings, it squirts water out of its trunk, sometimes on unsuspecting passers-by, sometimes on people asking for it, but always resulting in laughs and squeals (signs said that due to drought conditions, it was spraying less water than normal).

Inside the body of the elephant. This part felt almost exactly like the Steampunk Treehouse at Dogfish Head’s brewery in Delaware.

Riding in the elephant’s “saddlebags”, we’ll soon move up to the high balcony, while the couple below tries to avoid the spraying trunk.

We’re riding atop a giant elephant! (a rider of Rohan is probably about to send a spear through our faces while we’re distracted).

Walking along bike lanes and past the bus stop, it was funny to see locals going about their day and totally ignoring the giant elephant (though probably 90% at least gave a smile).

Heading into the final stretch, groundlings want to get close, but not close enough to get sprayed.

Disembarking from our elephant friend, directly to the 2nd level of the workshop.

His blinking eye was one of the many computer-controlled motions in the complex beast (his tail was manually-operated by his passengers).

“Growing” out of the workshop was this awesome “branch”, that signs still described as a piece/testbed of an enormous tree they’re building. Since the “test” has been ongoing for more than a decade, I wasn’t surprised to later read on Wikipedia that the project was cancelled a couple years ago. Did the success of their “business” kill their impetuous, budget-busting artistic drive to throw caution to the wind? Too bad, because the full-sized tree would have been insane.

The third phase, a 3 minute walk away (or 30 minutes, if you’re a super-slow giant elephant), is their 3-level carousel. The various sea-creatures and vessels that you can ride are probably a bit weirder than a standard carousel, but carousels tend to be weird to begin with, so it was the least-interesting phase for me. Our ticket said that we wouldn’t actually get to ride, just hear the stories from our tour guide (which were 95% in French), but once we made it up to the 3rd level, we were surprised when everyone was invited in to hop aboard.

We didn’t get to ride on this level of the carousel.

Rett rides (and operates) a steaming dragon on the carousel.

Days 2-5

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