One of the many Old Town Crier favorite traveling couples, Jeffrey and Joanne Fisher took their OTC on their latest trek through France.

Jeffrey and Joanne in front of and about to ride the Giant Mechanical Elephant in Nantes and checking out the OTC while waiting in line.

“You can ride an elephant in Nantes. Not a real one, mind. The forty-foot-high, moving, mechanical beast can carry forty-nine people, and is one of the city’s most famous attractions. The Grand Elephant, as it’s known, is one of several robotic animals who roam at the Machines De L’Île, a project founded by French artists François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice, which opened in 2007 and occupies old shipyards. It has been significant in building Nantes’s contemporary cultural image. France’s sixth-largest city lacks Paris’s sophistication and Marseille’s edginess, but since the 1990s, a campaign for cultural regeneration has reimagined it as the seat of surrealism, proudly embracing the words of André Breton who famously declared the city a place “where I have the impression that something worthwhile may happen to me””

Jeffrey in their hotel room in Sete’, a maritime town in Southern France on the Mediterranean.

“The town has a strong cultural identity. It has been the seat of Provencal jousting using boats for over 500 years. Each boat has 8 or 10 oarsmen, a couple of musicians aft, a a few jousters on the prow, waiting to take turns. On each pass of the boats past each other, the jouster on the prow tries to knock the other jouster into the water. You root for the red team or the blue team.  Over years the town has had to reinvent itself economically. Now, there are oyster beds and deep sea commercial fishing mostly for tuna.”

Many thanks to Jeffrey for providing such informative captions.