Day 5 St. Malo - Mont St. Michel

Leisurely start today for a change: we got to leave all our stuff at the hotel, eat a nice Continental breakfast, then board the bus for the drive to our first destination: St. Malo. This is a sea-front walled city on a peninsula in the Brittany region of France with a huge rock island directly off shore. What a wonder it was when we arrived: rain was pouring down and the wind was howling off the Atlantic. It was just at high tide of the equinox (highest tides ever, given the full moon), and waves were pounding the city walls, exploding into the air as though shot from water cannons. We learned a LOT from our City Guide, Corrine (Coco), who told us that the tides here swing 44 feet or more between high and low, and that the City was built over the centuries to withstand the weather and protect the tough Bretons from marauding Vikings and the warring Briitish and Spanish as the centuries passed. This place is a part of France, but obviously considers itself a place apart from France. Once the weather abated a bit we took a walking tour, wearing every bit of warm clothes we had. Coco gave a couple of animated talks at various stops, having to improvise a bit when we were forced to duck into a cathedral to escape a hail storm which unloaded on us with no warning. Turns out the cathedral had been heavily damaged in bombing during WWII, and we learned how it was repaired using the legacy of its most famous parishioner Jacques Cartier, an ancient mariner/explorer/tradesman who claimed Canada for the French hundreds of years ago on a voyage.

After some free time exploring St. Malo, we bussed to Mont St. Michel, an ancient Abby whose history goes back to the first century. It's built on an enormous stone mountain jutting from the sea in Brittany, with lowlands all around it. At high tide, it is surrounded entirely by the sea, like a fairy tale castle sticking up from the ocean. There is one road connecting it to the mainland. Over the centuries, the monks living there built many different rooms and worship areas, in various architectural styles, culminating in the Abbey Church, with a tall spire and statute of St. Michael on the very top. We climbed stairway after stairway to get to the top, again dealing with howling wind, rain and cold. Wow, those were some tough monks to live and work here! Lots of shops and eateries are now found all over this place, so we had a great time exploring during free time. A few of us ate at the famous omelette restaurant "La Mere Poulard", where they beat the omelette ingredients in special copper bowls, then pour the contents into long-handled skillets to cook them over an open fire. Like nothing else I ever tasted. Great! Then short ride back to our place at Plancoet, and time to explore that town a little more.

Tomorrow  we head to Paris via Chartres.

Pics at:  http://picasaweb.google.com/jlphil7584/2010EnglandFranceTrip02#