… on my travels yet again today.
And it started at about 04:00 when I had to leave my stinking pit for a ride on the porcelain horse, and fell AoT over something in the way, rattling the entire building. All in all it was another bad night.
After breakfast, I had a shower and then we headed off through the town and through all of the grockles admiring the seagulls.
The destination for today was, as you might expect, the Mont St Michel. Despite its reputation, it’s one of those places that everyone has to visit whenever they come to Brittany or Normandy just to say that they were there.
And it was another day when the visibility wasn’t up to much, unfortunately.
I mentioned the prices of the food in the restaurants on the island. And seeing as many people expressed their surprise I decided to take a photograph of a typical menu.
Vegetable soup is on offer at €16:00, and a basic omelette starts at €34:00. If you want a three-course meal you can have one here at €58:00.
A sandwich from the sandwich bar across the street will cost you at least €8:50. And so it’s no surprise that most of the tourists who visit the island bring their own picnic lunch
We’d come here in Caliburn of course, prepared to pay the extortionate car-parking prices, but had I been in better health I would have come another way.
Today is another day when the tidal coefficient is so small that it’s possible to walk over the sands from Genets. And there were quite a few parties coming over the sands.
That is something that you can’t do on your own without a guide. Apart from the treacherous watercourses, there’s quite a lot of soft sand out there which yu can sink into if you aren’t careful.
We went for a good walk around the walls again, our conversation being continually interrupted by a helicopter flying overhead.
There were building works going on somewhere on the island and they were conveying the material to the site by helicopter, in a basket slung underneath the machine.
We were having all kinds of flights of imagination, picturing the helicopter coming to a dead halt and the momentum of the basket underneath swinging into the walls of the Abbey and demolishing them.
When I was here the other week with Alison I had seen an exciting tracked machine away in the distance. It had excited my curiosity and so today we went down to look at it.
It’s a fire engine apparently, and it’s tracked so that it can climb up and down the steps in the city.
It has a trailer too. That is also tracked, and is also driven, with a prop shaft off the power take-off on the rear of the tractor. All in all, an impressive piece of kit.
Most of the tourists when they arrive enter by the main gate, go in over the drawbridge and past all of the tourist traps.
But there is another way in which misses the queues and congestion and goes up to the pathway that leads up to the walls on the western side of the site.
The way in is underneath that beautiful gated building down there and then up the hill towards where I’m standing. But I do have to say that I wouldn’t object at all to a little apartment in the building down there, despite all of the tourists.
Although the access to the site today is from the southern, or Normandy side, there’s also a gateway on the western side facing what was Brittany in medieval times prior to the rerouting of the river that passes around here.
I was told an exciting story about how, in 1424 during the Hundred Years War, the English besieged the island from the Normandy side but they were unable to starve the garrison out.
This was because the people on the Breton side would send food and weapons over to the Brittany gate and by the time that the tide had gone out sufficiently to enable the English to attack the gate here, the island had been supplied and the Bretons safely back on their shore.
We left the island early in the afternoon and set off on our way home.
We went again to the Cabane Vauban to see the view now that the weather had cleared slightly, and I took a couple of photos.
One of the ones that I took was right across the Baie de Mont St Michel over to the town of Cancale, the Pointe de Grouin and the Ile des Landes right across the bay and into Brittany.
It’s hard to believe that it’s all about 12 miles away.
This is the second half of the above photograph, that I had cropped in two.
This one shows another one of the islands off Cancale, which I thought at first might have been a ship, and the lighthouse on the Pierre de Herpin over on the extreme right of the photograph.
Right away in the background is the Brittany coast all the way down almost to St Malo and that’s probably about 25 miles away.
You might have noticed in the previous photograph that there was something on the horizon between the coast and the lighthouse.
I’d been having a good play with the telephoto lens and doing some photo manipulation, what with having plans for going on a holiday in the near future. And so I cropped, enlarged and enhanced that part of the image.
And I’ve managed to bring out what, in my opinion, is a three-masted sailing ship, something like the Marité. That’s actually quite impressive, seeing as it’s at least 20 miles away in my opinion.
The view southwards however is much more banal.
Mont St Michel is about 10 miles away as the crow flies, and in contrast to the other day when I was here with Alison and you could hardly see 100 yards, a little bit of “crop and paste” and image enhancement can bring out the abbey at Mont St Michel quite nicely.
To the right of the island are the white buildings of the hotel complex on the mainland. And I’m sure that this is what we have seen on a couple of occasions from Granville.
Talking of Granville, we can actually see that today from here.
There’s the Eglise Notre Dame de Cap Lihou on the far right, and to the left of it are the public rooms and the Foyer des Jeunes Travailleurs. To the left of that is the other block of apartments that they are renovating right now.
My building is out of sight behind there.
But that’s not all.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that the other day I mentioned an autogyro, but I wasn’t able to take a photograph of it. Today however, while we were here, the aforementioned went a-flying by overhead.
Luckily I had the camera ready and I was able to shoot off a photograph of it. It’s a modern machine, not one of the early ones from the 1920s and 30s.
So while you admire another photo of Mont St Michel – the one that the copped image above was taken, I can tell you that there are plenty of photos that I took at Mont St Michel that haven’t made it onto this page.
That’s because it’s my intention, one of these days in early course, to put them all up on a web page of their own.
And then you can admire them at your own convenience.
On the way back here we went to LeClerc. I needed some new bootlaces and Hans wanted to look at the recycled bags that they use here instead of plastic bags, and he took a few to analyse with him later.
Tea tonight was some taco wraps with a stuffing made of this couscous powder that I bought, some tomatoes, olives, onions, garlic and kidney beans, all in tomato sauce. With some spice rice it was delicious.
Having seen Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday last night, we watched a few Bulldog Drummond films on the DVD tonight. That took us nicely up to about 23:30 and then we turned in.
Hans is leaving to head off back to Germany tomorrow. I have a pile of tidying up to do and then I can start packing for my voyage, wherever it might be.
