The famous machine animals of Nantes

Voyage II of the month: Nantes. Nantes is the 6th largest city in France and a major hub of the Brittany region. Only a couple hours by train from La Rochelle, it was an easy weekend destination trip. Once you know its original inhabitants were a Gaulish tribe known as the Namnetes, you can easily determine from where this ancient city derives its name...today, it is also commonly referred to as the "Venice of the West" due to its position on the Loire, Erdre and Sèvre rivers.


Standing inside the beautiful Passage Pommeraye in city center. The indoor passage-way is small shopping mall built in the mid 1800s, and elaborately done with renaissance style sculptures.

Yet another reason Nantes is a cool place to visit...you can meet Mr. Incredible himself.




It seemed that every corner we took had yet another church in view. This impressive church, the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Nantes, took 457 years to finish and the people were finally able to celebrate its completion in 1891.

And my favorite part about Nantes by far...Les Machines de L'ile Nantes. Built in a couple warehouses of former shipyards, the concept for this unique museum is the brainchild of two artists, François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice, who visualized a sort of crossroads between the "imaginary worlds" of Jules Verne and the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci. Opened in 2007, the museum includes an exhibit gallery with a collection of mechanical creatures - manta ray, reverse-propelling squid, pirate fish, crab larva -- a workshop off to the side where you can see projects currently under construction, and (the center of attention!) the mechanical elephant.






The mechanical elephant is a whopping 12 meters high (of 39 feet, for all us Americans), made of 45 tons of steel and wood. It's exactly what you might envision while reading about the Sultans of Arabia riding their elephants into town, and for a paltry sum of 6 euros, you too can pretend to be a prince and ride on the elephant.
I didn't ride the elephant, but I did get to ride the smoke-spurting dragon (check it out!). Every animal machine had at least a couple seats for potential riders to hop on, although in the beginning it looked like only the little kids were going to be lucky enough to get the chance. Once I heard "adult volunteer," you can bet I was the first to raise my hand. It looks and feels like these machines were built a 100 years ago, and your job on a seat is a complex assortment of tasks all meant to be done at the same time. It becomes a sort of 'scratch your head and rub your stomach operation,' in which I had to rotate a squeaky lever on my right to make the dragon whiskers move, pull on another lever on my left to make the jaw rotate, and then stomp on a foot pedal for an action which I couldn't quite figure out for the duration of the demonstration.