Day 035 - Le Grand Elephant, Nantes 🐘🇫🇷

Day 035. A trip to the Île de Nantes to ride Le Grand Éléphant. The elephant is a 12-metre, 48-tonne machine of steel and tulipwood, built by Les Machines de l'Île, the workshop that makes giant mechanical creatures inspired by Jules Verne's imagined worlds and Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. It carries about fifty passengers on a slow walk along the old shipyards, and the whole thing is deliberately exposed: you can see every piston, gear and hydraulic line doing its job. It trumpets, it blinks, it rolls its eyes, and it sprays water from its trunk into the crowd. The boys love all of it. The noises, the gears, and especially the spraying, which is best when they get soaked. A proper engineering lesson in disguise. Their favourite moment, by a wide margin, is when I take a full trunk-blast directly to the crotch. Then a lot of bouncing at On va marcher sur la lune, the trampoline playground on the quays. We walk under the Grue jaune, the enormous yellow Titan crane on the Quai des Antilles, one of the last survivors of the shipbuilding era and now a listed monument standing guard over a waterfront full of bars. Along to the Hangar à Bananes, the long warehouse where bananas were once ripened after the crossing from the Caribbean, now galleries and restaurants. Bus to Magmaa Food Hall, where the boys get Greek and Ann and I have Indian. It's awesome. Then next door to rent paddles and play on the strange art ping pong tables: not rectangles but curved, kinked, multi-ended things, some built for eight players at once, which turns the game into something closer to a scrum. Nearby we find the Mètre à Ruban, Lilian Bourgeat's 136-metre tape measure, an exact giant copy of his own, unspooling across a courtyard and making everyone standing near it look like an ant. We wander the Passage Pommeraye, the three-level 1843 shopping arcade with its grand staircase, glass roof and rows of carved statues, probably the most beautiful indoor space in the city. Ann shops at Petit Pan and could happily be there all day. Book and bed. 📍 Today's stops Les Machines de l'Île and Le Grand Éléphant On va marcher sur la lune trampolines Grue jaune, Quai des Antilles Hangar à Bananes Magmaa Food Hall Art ping pong tables Mètre à Ruban by Lilian Bourgeat Passage Pommeraye Petit Pan 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 We're a family of four from Halifax, Nova Scotia, spending a year travelling through Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal, Hawaii, French Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia. New videos every day of the trip, so subscribe to follow along. #Nantes #France #LeGrandElephant #MachinesDeLile #PassagePommeraye #IleDeNantes #LeVoyageANantes #FamilyTravel #Sabbatical #TravelVlog #TravelWithKids