Lorient and lots of buses

Yesterday's focus was on visiting the remains of the largest German submarine base in France. This was of great interest to an ex maritime navigator, trained to detect and attack submarines.

We got a local bus to the railway station then train to Lorient, then , because the bus to where we wanted to go was not due for half an hour, got on another one going to within a km of where we wanted to go.  The very helpful driver, who knew where we wanted to go, told us, at her second last stop, that if we wanted to walk, we should get out there because it was closer than her terminus . At least that was what I gathered, but I confirmed it with the aid of Ms Google Map.  I said we would stay to the end. When we got to her terminus, after a while I understood what she was saying to us again, very helpfully. The  other bus we wanted was waiting for us, so get on. We did, the bus left straight away and took us to the door of where we wanted to go - a big complex now consisting of a huge marina, a museum, a submarine and 3 huge concrete structures , K1,K2 and K3, which used to house up to 30  German U boats. K1 and K2 now seem used by commercial boat building businesses and K3 is for visitors.

We went through the  museum which gave an overview of the Battle of the Atlantic  and Lorient's role in it., then through the submarine.  We had an audio guide in English which was good.  We had lunch and had a few hours to fill in, so amused ourselves by looking up the origins of the Pen Duick 3 , a boat moored nearby, then Eric Tabarly, a French yachtsman after whom the sailing part of the place is named, then the bird called a coal tit ( the Breton for coal tit is Pen Duick).  We wandered a bit around the marina. There seemed no obvious security, we walked past huge ocean going racing yachts, millions of dollars,  beautiful, sleek streamlined creatures,  a few trimarans.

Next the 1 1/2 hour tour of the K3 bunker, unfortunately in French, however we knew that. The guide spoke too quickly for me, needless to say. Noel knew enough about it to be able to explain to me some of the interesting engineering aspects.  We looked at the pens, climbed lots of steps to look at the sytem of turning a wet dock into a dry dock, then more steps to look at the concrete roof which was in lots of sections with a space underneath so that a bomb dropped from above would dissipate its energy and not do damage to  the structure below.  The 27ft thick roof withstood intensive allied bombing virtually intact.

A bus came along just as we were leaving, but it was going in the wrong direction. The driver told me the next one in the right direction would be in 30 minutes, so we set off walking towards the station and about half way there got a different bus to the station.  We just caught a train back and in rushing,  we forgot to valiate the tickets and got caught. The ticket inspector was quite entitled to fine us, but , after listening to my honest excuse, rattled off  lots of words , too fast for me, and scribbled on our ticket and moved on, without demanding money, so we were lucky.

Another bus from the gare and a nice dinner on our way back to the apartment.