Passed through Caen enroute to the Gite, Brico Depot shopping and saw Barfleur still there

On our drive down the autoroute from the Eurotunnel terminal to our Brittany holiday we have to drive around the Caen Périphérique Périphérique, normally to the south side following the signs for Rennes, as its slightly shorter that way.

This time though I elected to drive round the Northern side of Caen, mainly because I wanted stop off at a branch of Brico Depot which I know is just off the N13 in the Caen-Carpiquet ZI (industrial estate):


View larger Google Streetview of Caen Brico Depot

(as an aside it's interesting that the Google Streetview of Caen Brico Depotwas obviously taken on a weekend with only a few cars in the carpark whereas the Google maps photo of Caen Brico Depot is obviously on a busy week-day)

I unfortunately had to call into Brico Depot to try to buy a new rubber washer for the toilet float valve in the new toilet we had installed in our second Gite. It was only a couple of years old, we'd probably only used the toilet two or three times and the rubber had already perished so the toilet kept on filling up.

We'd bought the toilet from Brico Depot so figured on going back there to buy a new washer. Unfortunately no such luck, they had no replacement washers at all and all the toilet flush mechanisms looked quite different from the one we had installed in our Brico toilet. So ended up having to buy a whole new flush mechanism but was slightly pleased that was *just* €7 rather than the absolutely outrageous €25 I was charged when I had to go to a local builders merchant to buy a replacement toilet flush mechanism for our main Gite.
Just shows the difference in price you pay with Brico Depot over the 'typical' regional builders merchants. Unfortunately the nearest Brico Depots are in Rennes and St Brieuc both which are 40 minutes drive from the Gite so its got to be "worth it" to make a special trip.

On the way round Caen I spotted that Brittany Ferries Barfleur was still moored up on the Caen river, looking just the same as when I spotted Barfleur on my drive down to the Gite in April 2010.

I managed to take a better photo this time as Liz was driving the car; last time I was trying to continue driving and take photos at the same time!

Barfleur moored in Caen

Barfleur spotted in Caen

Just before Christmas 2009 I reported on the decision by Brittany Ferries to withdraw the Poole/Cherbourg ferry service and with it to retire the Barfleur after 18 years service on this route.

Well you may have wondered what's happened to Barfleur since Brittany Ferries withdrew the boat from service?

On the 8th April when I was on holiday in Brittany I quite by chance found the answer to that question when I was driving from Boulogne down to Brittany. The route I take follows the autoroute down past Abbeville, Amiens, through Rouen, round Caen, through Avranches, past Mont St Michel and then the last 30 miles is smaller country roads to get to our Gite.

At Caen I always go round the South side of the Périphérique (ring-road) as its less crowded and is I think slightly shorter and quicker than going round the Northern side of Caen. But just for once I took the Périphérique Nord because I wanted to call into the big Brico Depot DIY merchant which is to the northern side of Caen.

Going round to the North of Caen takes you over a river estuary and as I was driving along I noticed a large boat on the river, which I then noticed was painted in Brittany Ferries colours, and as I drove past I spotted it was Barfleur that had been moored up in this presumably quiet location.

I managed to get my camera out in time and snap a few pictures as I drove past, sorry about the railings in the way but I was driving at the time and couldn't stop so I think I have a decent excuse!

The ferry looked pretty much as if it would have done when it finished service on 7th March 2010. I wonder what Brittany Ferries plans are for her?

Barfleur moored in Caen

Here's a link to the Google Map position of where Barfleur is currently moored.

Brittany Ferries launches the Cap Finistere

Back in December I passed on news that Brittany Ferries were increasing sailings on the Portsmouth to Santander route with a new (to them) ferry, the Superfast V purchased from Attica for £75m.

The new ferry, now renamed the Cap Finistere entered service with Brittany Ferries on Monday with its first sailing from Portsmouth as reported on The Portsmouth News.

There's an interview with Jean-Marc Roue (the President of Brittany Ferries) on Le Telegramme.com about the introduction of the new service, and in the interview Jean-Marc comments that they bought this boat because of the speed that they could bring it into service as compared to waiting for a new vessel to be constructed. Apparently each boat has to be almost custom-made to fit the berthing requirements of the ports they are going to use and so it was a difficult job to find a suitable ferry.
Unfortunately Google Translate has (for once) made a bit of a hash of the translation from French, but you can understand enough to get the gist of the Cap Finistere launch article on Telegramme.com.

Finally, further details of the facilities onboard mv Cap Finistere are on Brittany Ferries website.

And in case you didn't know, Finistere is department 29 in Brittany, the western end of Brittany. I did look on both Google Maps and Via Michelin and couldn't find a place called "Cap Finistere" so I guess it's a made up name, but with Brittany connotations.

Ferry collection - More Condor from Poole, less P&O from Portsmouth and even less EuroFerries

A quick catchup on some ferry bits of news that I've come across in the last couple of weeks ...


First up coming after the news that Brittany Ferries are stopping their year round summer ferry from Poole to Cherbourg, Condor Ferries have been quick to respond that they're increasing summer crossings from Poole to St Malo with 30 additional sailings of their high speed catamaran service. Condor point out that "St Malo and Cherbourg are less than 85 miles apart".

I also reported that Brittany Ferries are increasing their Portsmouth-Santander Spanish service and this news has recently been followed by an announcement from P&O that they're finishing their Portsmouth to Bilbao service in September this year.

It's interesting how one ferry company (Brittany Ferries) can be reporting that they're doing bumper service from the UK to Spain, so much so that they've bought a second boat to increase the number of sailings, whereas P&O have found the route to be "loosing millions" and after 15 years have pulled the plug. The two Spanish ports are less than an hours drive apart so I guess there'll be a lot of P&O customers who will now switch to Brittany Ferries who find themselves in a monopoly position.

And finally news of EuroFerries. I've reported a number of times about EuroFerries stop-start approach to commencing operations from Ramsgate to Boulogne, the most recent being news in November when the service start was pushed back to March 2010.
Well the news once again isn't good.

ThisIsKent reported last week that EuroFerries have cancelled their lease on the Bonanza Express which was to be used for the new service. EuroFerries logo has been painted out from the boat which has now returned to its shuttle service in the Canary Islands.

EuroFerries website still tantalisingly offers crossings "from £49" and shows a timetable starting on 1st March, but without a boat you do have to wonder how likely this is to get off the ground. More "wait and see" again ...

Brittany Ferries and Barfleur say "Farewell" to Poole

Earlier this week the BBC reported that Brittany Ferries had quietly dropped the Barfleur conventional ferry service from Poole to Cherbourg, terminating the daily ferry service to France that has operated for the past 17 years.

Not surprisingly the Bournemouth Echo reports the town's "Bitter disappointment" in loosing the Barfleur service although Steve Tuckwell, a spokesman for Brittany Ferries, is quoted as saying that the service has been "haemorrhaging money" and that "The Poole to Cherbourg route using Barfleur has lost us money since 2003”, so it's perhaps hardly surprising that the route is being axed.

Later in the week the Bournemouth Echo reported rather nostalgically about how loosing Barfleur is the 'end of an era', and recalled Brittany Ferries optimism when the boat was commissioned in 1991 to compete head-on with the forthcoming Eurotunnel service.

At the time the new boat was actually delayed by 3 months as Brittany Ferries ordered the Finnish Kvaerner-Masa yards in Helsinki to "stretch" the new boat at a cost of an additional £5 million by welding an extra nine metres into its mid-section, increasing the ferry’s length and weight, and providing 200 more cabin berths, and more public and car deck areas.

Barfleur will complete its last sailing on 7th March 2010 and will be taken out of service afterwards. Poole will still retain the high speed Normandie Vitesse catamaran service to Cherbourg which operates through the summer months from May through to September.

In slight recompense Brittany Ferries have also announced that they're increasing sailings from Portsmouth to Cherbourg, and will also increase the Portsmouth to Santander (Northern Spain) service from 4 crossings a week to 5, having purchased the Superfast V cruise ferry for £75m from Greek company Attica to boost their capacity on this route.
Brittany Ferries have been strongly promoting the benefits of cruising to Spain rather than driving down through France and by 2012 are predicting to be carrying 250,000 passengers each year to from the UK to Spain.

I noticed that the Brittany Ferries website now offers services from "Poole / Portsmouth to Cherbourg" rather than there being separate routes from "Poole to Cherbourg" and "Portsmouth to Cherbourg" - despite the fact that it's an hour or so's drive between the two ports.

Just how big is Brittany Ferries website?

I came across a rather odd article the other day that announced that as a result of implementing some website optimisation software, Brittany Ferries website had leapt from having 3,000 webpages indexed by Google to 308,000 pages being indexed by the search engine.

I have to admit I was astonished by this marketing claim. Just how big is Brittany Ferries website? I can't imagine how they can possibly have three hundred thousand unique pages of website content even if they include affiliated organisations such as their Brittany Ferries Gites & Cottages directory. A thousand or so maybe but that's an absolutely incredible amount of material.

So I did a few searches for myself.

Self SEO have a tool that will search the major search engines and tell you how many pages you have indexed on the search engines.

For BrittanyFerries.com SelfSEO reported 14 indexed pages, but for Brittany-Ferries.co.uk it reported 346,000 pages as being indexed!

Alternatively in the Google search box you can type the query

          "inurl:putyourdomainnamehere.com site:putyourdomainnamehere.com -qwertrew"

where "qwertrew" is some term that does NOT appear on any of your pages.

Try this for www.brittany-ferries.co.uk and then click on the 'repeat the search with the omitted results included' and I got 42,300 pages but if you dig down then an awful lot of the pages seem awfully similar to each other.

So it's odd that the numbers can be so wildly different depending on how you 'ask' Google what it's indexed.

So repeating these queries on something I know the answer to, my very own www.giteinbrittany.com vacation rental website.

SelfSEO revealed 119 pages indexed, and via the 'inurl' Google search trick, 118 pages indexed.

Digging around and counting up I found that there are 27 actual pages of content (Gite description, places to visit, travel directions, current availability) on the Gite website, 74 availability calendar pages (one for each month from January 2005 through to January 2011), 14 different 'test' pages I've written whilst trying out ideas (like the website redesign of 2006) and 5 different PDF documents (booking enquiry form, etc).

So the 'correct' answer is somewhere around 120 if you add all these together - thus the SelfSEO number seems just about on the mark.

Which leads me back to sort of trusting the website index statistics unearthed by SelfSEO, and thus begs the question I started off with, Just how does Brittany Ferries end up with so many unique website pages?

It's taken me long enough to write a hundred or so pages !

BFenthusiasts.com - Brittany Ferries Enthusiasts

Just come across the Brittany Ferries enthusiasts website, an unofficial website that in their own words was "created by ferry enthusiasts for other enthusiasts and travellers who have an interest in the day to day operations of Brittany Ferries".

There's quite a lot of information on the site about the different ferries that BF operate, the different routes, the company history and onboard facilities, etc, but the main energy and updates in the site goes on in the BFenthusiasts forum.

Browsing through the forum tonight I found articles musing on a sister ship for Mont St Michel, the savings to be had with the Brittany Ferries Owners Club and the cheapest time to buy a BF crossing ticket.

Personally after using them extensively for the first couple of years of owning our French holiday home we've now stopped using Brittany Ferries because the ticket prices were so high, but having said that I know other people who love their boats and cross with them to France every year. The summary on the enthusiasts site of the Brittany Ferries onboard accommodation sums it up quite well

Their ships can be described as cruise ferries offering facilities and standards of comfort expected of a cruise ship rather than a cross channel ferry. Facilities include shopping malls, cinemas, restaurants, bars, tourist offices and even swimming pools.

As with much in life you pays your money you takes your choice. But anyway, the BF enthusiasts site is worth a read and there's even a forum section on news and views about other ferry companies.

New €81m cruise-ferry for Brittany Ferries' Plymouth-Roscoff route

Brittany Ferries mv "Armorique"

News from Brittany Ferries of a new cruise-ferry "Armorique" which is currently under construction at the Aker shipyard in Helsinki.

The name "Armorique" comes from a national park of outstanding beauty in western Brittany and is not the first BF ferry to bear this name, the previous Armorique operated from 1975 to 1992.

Armorique will be 167 metres long and 26.8 metres wide. With a cruising speed of 23 knots, she will have 250 cabins and be able to accommodate 1500 passengers, 470 cars and 65 lorries on the 1.1km long freight deck! She will feature a large shopping area, a variety of bars, lounges, seating areas, teenager play area and an onboard cinema.

A bigger picture of Armorique and PDF factsheet on Armorique are available on Aker yard's website.

Armorique will be used solely on the Plymouth-Roscoff route, replacing Pont l'Abbé which is currently on short-term charter, in the autumn of 2008.

A snip at a mere €81,000,000 !

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Categories: BrittanyFerries, Brittany, Ferry

Enjoy a day in France for only £10 with Brittany Ferries

Brittany Ferries

Brittany Ferries are running a promotion from now to the end of June on all their crossings from Poole, Plymouth and Portsmouth into Brittany and Normandy of "a day in France for £10".

There are small additional supplements for Friday and Saturday crossings and it's an extra £25 if you want to take your car as well, but these are still great value fares if you fancy a quick spring top-up of France, French cuisine and of course lots of French Wine !

Brittany Ferries definitely run the best equipped ships on the channel routes with on-board cinema's, children's entertainers, a swimming pool (on Pont Aven) and the usual restaurants, bars and shops. Usually you pay quite a hefty price for crossing with BF (especially in peak season), but not with this offer.

See BF's website for further details of this 'day in France for £10 offer' and for a summary of the facilities on-board Brittany Ferries fleet

Brittany Ferry prices starting to hot up

Despite P&O pulling out of the Portsmouth/Le Havre route last year there still seems to be quite a lot of competition over prices.

Today I received an email from Brittany Ferries announcing £55 return mid-week sailings on the Poole/Cherbourg route from now to April for stays of up to 5 days. The prices rise a little more for weekend journeys or longer durations but are still only £119 for a weekend to weekend return in May.

Cherbourg is about 4 hours drive from our Gite, on motorway for all but the last 30 miles, and unlike other parts of France there are no motorways tolls on this route.

Other than Easter and the half-term school holiday we've still got availability through to May so perhaps someone will take advantage of these fares and stay with us ?

Our half-term holiday's cancelled - my mum's died

Been an awful week just gone, and even writing this retrospective Blog entry 10 months later it's still no easier to look back on the events that have happened so I'll recap over them briefly.

Wednesday 18th May

My mum phoned me up on my mobile whilst I was at work to ask me about some paint I'd asked her to get from B&Q. We were due to go up to see my parents in Lancashire for the weekend on the Friday as it was her 68th birthday that day.

I quite like one of the pastel paint ranges from B&Q, we've done the hall and lounge in our UK house in the pale yellow colour and two of the bedrooms and the kitchen in our Brittany Holiday Home are also done in different shades from the same range. Wednesday is 10% off day for senior citizens so she was buying some more paint for me and getting the discount !
Anyway brief chat and she said that she'd give me a ring later on that evening.

Just after midnight got a call from my Dad saying that my mum's complained of feeling dizzy, checked her blood pressure (on a portable reader I bought for her last year) and found it was way too high. My Dad insisted that she went off to hospital and she went reluctantly, worrying about my Dad (who is wheelchair bound following a stroke 3 years ago) as she went. Offered to drive up but agreed that I'd wait until there was more news.


Thursday 19th May

5:45 am phone call from my Dad. He's been back into hospital again, she's "very poorly", had a "major stroke" and has been transferred to Preston Royal Hospital. I said I'd come up straight away. Threw a few things together and left within half an hour.

We live in Bedfordshire and my parents are in Lancashire - just about 190 miles door to door. Depending on traffic it takes 3 and a half to 5 hours to drive including stops.
As I left I figured that under the circumstances I had a good reason for driving quicker than I normally would do and so I completed the journey in 2 and ¾ hours.

In case the boys in blue have taken up Blog reading I'll make no comments about the precise speed I drove at, but the roads were very empty and I did take the M6 Toll bypass round Birmingham (for the first, and so far only, time) - worth the money on this occasion.


Saturday 21st May

I've skipped over a bit of the story but the essence of it was that she'd had a stroke and was only being kept alive in the intensive care unit by the ventilator. The stroke had been massive and fatal at the same time and on the Saturday the consultant confirmed what I'd thought that there was essentially nothing left.

In some respects this made it easier to come to the decision we did. My mum (and Dad) had always believed in organ donation and we gave our approval for any of her organs to be used for the benefit of others. Some months later we received thank you cards from the families of those who benefited - indirectly we helped a number of children and grand-children that we'll never know by improving the life of one of their loved ones.


Monday 23rd May

Had the most almighty row with Brittany Ferries. I was due to be going over to France the following week to with my friend Stephen and his girlfriend Harriett for a week's holiday, to do some gardening and to finish decorating the third bedroom in our Gite.

I'd bought the ferry tickets some time beforehand and unfortunately they were a special offer that was "non refundable".
As I explained to the BF lady I absolutely couldn't use the tickets any more (the funeral was that week) and that when I'd bought them I "hadn't intended to be burying my mother that week".
BF were adamant that I couldn't get a refund for the tickets as they were a special offer. Eventually we agreed to amend the ferry booking to a month later (for which I had to pay a £25 amendment fee). Oh well at least I didn't loose out on the total ferry cost.


Wednesday 25th May

Not expecting that I would get anywhere I listed next week's holiday (which was the school half-term week) on ebay as a "late availability" 3 day buy-it-now offer on ebay and was successful - a family of 5 are going to be enjoying themselves in Brittany whilst I'm sorting out arrangements back home.

One slightly brighter part of an otherwise awful week.

Only problem was that the Gite only had two bedrooms at the time (so could only sleep 4 - one of the things I was going to do whilst over that week was to finish the 3rd bedroom) so it meant that I had to get our local agents to carry through the other bed and assemble it in the master bedroom. Thanks Cherril !