Nantes; Saturday, 22 February, 2025

As take-off was pre-dawn I’d stayed overnight at an airport hotel, but that still meant getting up at a ridiculous time in the morning. After a light breakfast in the hotel, I headed into the terminal and was quickly through security and into the departures lounge.

It wasn’t that long until we got called to a bus gate and then a very long drive round most of the airport perimeter to the plane which was parked virtually in Crawley. With the early gate call and the buses, it meant that the plane was all closed up and ready to go well ahead of schedule, so we were already airborne by the time we were originally supposed to be pushing back for a smooth flight almost all the way to Nantes.

Looking at landing 20 minutes ahead of schedule the weather in Nantes had other plans for us with heavy low cloud obscuring the end of the runway with just seconds left before landing the engines surged back up to full power and the plane shot back up into the sky as the pilots initiated a go around and after a little bit of flying around made a second successful attempt at landing this time from the opposite direction.

Thankfully, unlike in Marseille a few months earlier when I’d also experienced a go around, there were no other flights landing around us or faulty air bridges to delay our exiting the plane and so I was through immigration and onto the same bus into town that I had originally been aiming for.

With the very early start it meant that I was in the centre of Nantes a little after 10am and after stopping to grab some water and a couple of croissants from a Carrefour in the centre of town for a late extra breakfast I headed over to the Château des ducs de Bretagne, the city centre castle dating from the time when the city was the centre of power for Brittany. Today the chateau grounds and ramparts are open to explore and the main palace building – the Grand Logis – is now the city’s museum which I spent quite a bit of time exploring.

After looking round the castle and it’s grounds I hopped on a tram a couple of stops further east to the Jardin des Plantes, the city’s botanical gardens for a wander around them in the hour or so I had spare before my hotel room would be ready, though some of that time was spent dashing from shelter to shelter as a series of hefty, but short, showers passed through the area.

From the botanical gardens I caught the tram back along the central spine of the city over to the Place Royal and my hotel where I was able to check in and finally get the increasingly heavy back off my back that I’d been lugging around for the morning. I quickly freshened up and then headed back out again to explore more of the city, first by heading over to the nearby Place Royal, Basilica of Saint Nicholas and behind that a tiny surviving fragment of the old city gate of Porte Sauvetout before wandering back through the elegant Passage Pommeraye.

As the sun was starting to set, I headed back over to the Chateau to take in the views of the palace at sunset, though it turned out that not much of the site is floodlit, so once it was dark there wasn’t much to see. From the chateau I walked the short distance to the nearby Cathedral which at the time of visiting was still closed for restoration following a massive fire in 2020.

Next to the cathedral is another of the old city gates, the Porte Saint-Pierre, and I had a bit of a wander around this part of the city before heading back in towards the centre in search of dinner and then back to my hotel for a well-deserved nights rest.