Today was a fairytale...

Unlike pilgrims of times past, Mike and I braved neither quicksands nor tides to journey to Mont-St-Michel. But we did have to endure the reportedly perennial flood of tourists.

through the portcullis and into the throng

Of which we were part, so one can't really complain. Like all magical places, everyone wants a little piece of it. The narrow streets of Mont-St-Michel during the day are so ridiculously packed we didn't want to fight through them with our luggage looking for our hotel. Therefore the first thing I did was to go to the information center.

I was looking over the maps and couldn't find one in English. The information clerk looked over the desk at me and said something in French that I didn't catch. I sort of stuttered at him (French speakers look away now) une carte de Anglais s'il vous plait?




He looked at me passively for a good 10 seconds and then answered, "I'm not sure what it is you just said, but I think what you want is a map in English."

He handed me one from a pile behind the desk. I scuttled away.



Mike, waiting outside with the backpacks, laughed himself sick.



I needed to be laughed at one more time like I need a hole in the head, but as you know, those moments are the ones that make travel a great time to learn things about yourself.


Speaking of holes in the head, let me tell you how Mont-St-Michel came to be.

According to legend, in the year 708, St Aubert the Bishop of Avranches was visited by the Archangel Michael three times. On each occasion Aubert was instructed by his heavenly visitor to build a church on the rocky island then known as Mont Tombe. You remember the quicksands and tides...this was a daunting task to say the least, so Aubert ignored St Michael.

The Archangel, apparently not appreciating being taken lightly, and not the gentlest member of the holy host, burned a hole in Bishop Aubert's skull with his finger.

This was convincing. St. Michael got his church, and pretty darned quick, too.


Fast forward back to us, 1300 years later. The Auberge Saint-Pierre Hotel receptionist gave us a choice as to how she would lead us to our room...the way with fewest stairs but quite crowded, or the long way with many stairs and not too many people. We went for the latter, with the obvious approval of our receptionist.

Going up through the village was amazing, and also one heck of a cardiac workout. Up stone stairs, then more, and yes more. The buildings were also stone, with a smattering of wood and metal, all straight out of a fairytale. We went past a tiny cemetery, with aged stones and cascading roses, up staircases with more stonework walls. Truly another world which we couldn't have been more pleased to experience without crowds, the main street left behind.

With burning thighs but glad hearts we entered our room through a discrete doorway -the hotel rooms were not in a central location but dispersed around the island, and it was anyone's guess as to which one we would get.


Ours was splendid. With a view over the water and salt marshes, through windows that were straight out of Snow White, and above, heavy dark beams in a creamy high cupola ceiling, our own little nest in a medieval town. Happy campers.



There was also a bit of smugness involved. You see, while 2 million people visit Mont-St-Michel each year, only those who are staying overnight may remain on the island after dark. We'd made a good decision staying on the island in another way; the hotels on the other side of the causeway were, if one looks over the online reviews, uniformly expensive and hideous. Some folks try to squeeze in Mont-St-Michel as a day trip. I think they miss an awful lot.

Once you've spent the time and currency to get there, as I see it, there's no point in being cheap. You might as well go for the gusto...and to save money in others ways, take your photographs, buy only the occasional postcard as a souvenir, and for heaven's sake, carry a nice bottle of mainland grocery-store purchased wine and a corkscrew in your backpack.

St Joan of Arc

We stopped to watch a famous Mère Poulard omelette being made. A specialty of Mont-St-Michel, these are created by separating eggs, whisking the yolks in a copper bowl and then putting them into a special long-handled pan over the fire with some melted butter. When they start to thicken, egg whites that have been beaten into foamy peaks and some Crème Fraîche are gently added, and then the entire beautiful mess is folded into the fluffiest mass of egg goodness you can imagine. You may then eat this omlette if you are willing to fork over 30 Euros for it. About $40.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Makes you appreciate the humble $1.50 street hotdog, doesn't it?

No surprise, those aren't available on the island. There was a gourmet dinner available through the hotel (gourmet in Mont-St-Michel translates to expensive, average-esque French cuisine -which is still relatively good -with less than perfect service). What with the views and the delight of actually being there at Mont-St-Michel, well, we could afford to let it slide this once, and I have to say the chocolate mousse at the end of the meal was exquisite.

As it was, I kept feeling like someone should pinch me to see if it was all real or merely a dream.

hint of things to come

The pièce de résistance of our time on the island, though, had to be put off, with great anticipation, until after dark.

We wandered and wandered the battlements, the gardens, the towers and fortification walls, ever aware of the majestic Abbey above us as the day ebbed, taillights disappeared across the causeway, the footsteps of day visitors faded and were forgotten, the ancient stone silent.

We found ourselves alone more often than not, as though we had the entire Mont to ourselves.

Finally darkness fell over Mont-St-Michel, and after a last glass of wine, we made sure we had our tickets and climbed up and up through the velvety evening to the Abbey. There were stars, and little bats swooping through the air to capture insects attracted by the floodlights, and the intensely medieval Abbey. The air was fragrant with the ancient scents of sea and rock.

Feeling even more like pilgrims in the dark, we finally came to the abbey. It remained undiminished by our proximity. Sometimes when you get closer to something it becomes more ordinary and accessible. Not the Abbey of Mont-St-Michel. Far from it.

Close up, its presence is even more impressive, more enchanting. It felt like a spiritual journey to approach and enter this holy place.

A massive undertaking, the Abbey was built during the 11th-16th centuries, the materials brought laboriously up the rock by means of a giant chain and wheel pulley system Two men would stand inside the wheel, not unlike hamsters, and walk to raise and lower loads. I was rather disappointed that I didn't get a good clear photo of that wheel; Mike standing next to it was dwarfed by it's size and the view down the sheer walls was well worth a swaying moment of vertigo.

Inside the labyrinthine Abbey, I am told you can get rather lost during the day, but at nighttime they have a pathway carefully roped off for visitors.

The thick stone walls envelop you and you get an idea as to how it was, hundreds of years ago, to be a devout monk here. How easy it must have been to worship God with their hearts and minds, rejoicing in the high spaces and forbidding, mysterious beauty of the place.

The path you walk is a masterpiece, combining light and shadows, sound and silence in turn. You come upon musicians in spaces, a piano first, then a flute, a cello, and lastly, in the great apse of the abbey church, a harp whose notes fill the space and are lost an instant later.


You walk almost in a daze, to behold such greatness.

It is not unusual to see tears sliding down cheeks of visitors in the darkness, often unnoticed and unchecked in the darkness.

After the church are the cloisters of the monks, In their dining hall, the Benedictines would have dined in silence, perhaps hearing scriptures read. For us, the ghostly room echoed with the amplified and ominous tick-tock of an unseen clock, a reminder of mortality, perhaps.

My favorite place in the Abbey, even more than the soaring apse of the church, (left) would have to have been the gardens. Framed on all four sides by a arching covered walkway, the monks grew cooking and medicinal herbs there, and you could smell the lavender, even in the black night. Can you imagine how blissful, how rapturous it must have been, so high up in the air, to tend a garden?

Beyond, Brittany and Normandy spread out below us, divided by the Couesnon River. Soon the paved causeway from the 1800s, which is causing silt and mud to build up around the island and threatening to make Mont-St-Michel part of the mainland, will be replaced by a bridge, so that the tides may once again sweep away the buildup, leaving Mont-St-Michel the fairytale island it should remain.

As for Mike and me, it was with regret and a unlooked-for sense of loss that we left the Abbey behind. Hours after we had entered, and well after midnight, we drifted down the stone stairs to our room. I found myself drawn to look back almost irresistibly to the gilded statue of St Michael at the very tip of the Abbey high in the heavens above us.

The rest of our time in Mont-St-Michel was again, as if in a dream, and when we watched the tides come in again in the morning, the presence of the Abbey behind us was nearly palpable. Mike had carefully scheduled our entire vacation around the tides so that we would be at Mont-St-Michel at the best possible time, yet somehow the divine power of the Abbey surpassed even the tides in my memories.

It was a wonderful revelation to me that the realisation of a childhood dream could, in fact, be even better than I imagined. Being an adult, the gradual loss of childish fancies and beliefs has been a hard, cold, and I thought, inevitable reality.

But there are still places beyond the everyday, places like Mont-St-Michel, to be explored and delighted in, that simply transcend the life of one person.

Green grass and high tides forever, castles of stone souls and glory

Our next destination is a place I'd wanted to visit ever since I was a little girl. I saw a poster of it a long time ago, in an elementary school office, I think it was, and was immediately besotted. This place of my little girl-dreams is Mont-St-Michel, a tidal island of rock with an enchanting village spiraling up to a Gothic abbey which stretches up to the heavens. It just doesn't get any better than that.

What makes this place truly mystical is the tides, which come in at a 17 feet a second. When pilgrims travelled across the tidal flats to Mont-St-Michel they risked their lives, braving not only the tides but also disorienting fogs and quicksands. A destination this stunning and deemed worth peril to attempt through many, many centuries is a treasure indeed.

Our journey would be much more prosaic, of course. A train, and then a bus, and we had no intention of wandering out onto the tidal flats, though one can, with a guide, if you're wise.

I hadn't even realised we would be anywhere near Mont-St-Michel when we first started planning the trip, and when Mike came to me with the idea, I was thrilled. Mike was really rather pleased with himself that he'd be making a childhood dream of mine come true. I'll tell you about inside the walls in the next post, but for now, let me show you the tide. You'll indulge me, I hope. The gendarmes' major task is to keep dumb tourists from drowning or getting sucked into the sands, and as huge numbers of people come every day to watch the tides galloping in, some 10 million a year, the officers have their work cut out for them.

To this end they have the exciting looking vehicle, above, and when the tides are due to come in they escort anyone who even looks like they might want to leave the safety areas back to where they belong. I foolishly tried to peek around the corner of the walled city to see if we could see the tide coming across the plain and got the whistle. And felt both guilty and chagrined.

Of course, I feel guilty whenever I think a store clerk is watching me like I'm plotting some shoplifting, and I really feel guilty whenever we go through questioning at airport security.

You'd think I was either a criminal or Catholic.

With the floods of tourists, we watched the tide that Victor Hugo famously described as moving à la vitesse d'un cheval au galop, "as swiftly as a galloping horse." It was very much as if an enormous salty, muddy river had changed course. It pulled and seethed at the buoys, foaming in waves upon the rapidly disappearing shores.

We backed up, then backed up some more, and still more...

The Gendarmes took to their motorboats, circling rapidly over the turbid tidewaters around Mont-St-Michel, looking for flailing arms or cars foolishly parked outside the safe zones. Apparently a bus had to be tethered once, to keep it from floating away, and when the driver came back he found it a total loss, full of salt water and silt.

I'll bet that was an interesting conversation between him and his boss.

The waters came up and covered everything but the causeway. We retreated and went for higher ground, climbing the ramparts to get a view over the waters, marveling at the swirl of the powerful currents and vehicles massed to view the spectacle that has been drawing tourists since the Middle Ages.

Leaning against the ancient stone, I spied the tiniest hummingbird feeding unconcernedly from bright flowers clinging to the steep walls. He was so tiny that a Frenchwoman beside us insisted that it was a bug, not a bird.

Whatever. I have video footage, and I know that difference between an insect and a hummingbird.

As it turned out, there are no hummingbirds in Europe and I was in for a lesson in humility. The critter we saw was a hummingbird moth, which apparently so closely mimics the behaviors and appearances of hummingbirds, including making a humming noise, that many people are fooled. Me too.

Humility and awe. I was doing well.

Medieval courtyard and crucifix with the shadow of the abbey over the tide.

You're the cream in my coffee...

The countryside of Brittany was sounding her siren call to be explored and by morning Mike and I were raring to hit the road again, waking up sore, but probably less so than we deserved. This time we looked to our little car with gratitude. We might get lost, but at least we'd get lost in comfort. Carefully noting landmarks so that we might make it back home, we headed out.

First on the agenda: get a good map, cost be damned. I still had to hold out money like a moron (crétin fini) to let the cashier pick out what was owed, still not quite able to understand spoken numbers, but I was getting better.

Then we braved a pharmacy to ask for a decongestant for Mike. Try to explain "antihistamine" in French. If you can do this, I am very, very impressed.

The pharmacy assistant was both kind and persistent and we got it figured out.

Once again, I was behind the wheel, and there was just one place I wanted to go. Poor Mike, he never had a chance.

Mike! Mike! Look at this! There's a place called Fort La Latte, a castle, on the Cote d'Émeraude!

Sometimes a girl simply must be indulged.

Did I care how far it was? No. Was it on the way to other "must-see" destinations of Brittany? Nope, not really, but we didn't have to go to all the places were were "supposed" to go. Who wanted a cookie cutter vacation anyway?

If you wish to drive your car into the French waters of St Malo's locks,

here is an opportune place to do so.

Not to mention that he had to do something to stop me from jumping up and down. Best to agree before I injured myself.

The coastline of Northeast Brittany is covered with wild gorse and purple heather and the water there is blue, blue, blue beneath cliff sides, waves curling up to hidden rocky coves.

A fairytale of a place, this is the soul of Bretagne, a place of lighthouses and fishermen, castles and druids and tales of giants from long ago, megaliths, and always the sea.

To the Emerald Coast, then, to Cap Fréhel with its two lighthouses and numerous carefully piled groups of rocks that I would call Inukshuks, but who knows what the French call them? To the Inuits, an Inukshuk means that someone has been there before you, that you are on the right path. Amongst those piles of stones we looked out over the water for our first glimpse of Fort La Latte, just barely able to make out its romantic silhouette.

I didn't even want to stop for an espresso before piling back into the car and getting over there tout suite.

Created from pink sandstone (yes, pink!), Fort La Latte is truly a vision.

From the 1300s, the castle with the fabulous name is brilliantly perched upon the steeply cliffed Baye de la Fresnaye, separated from the mainland by two deep chasms with drawbridges over them.



Drawbridges! And portcullises!
Call me Buttercup.

And there's a trebuchet.


Mike was pretty happy. If only we'd picked up a pumpkin for chunkin'...not that the French Ministry of Culture would have allowed any such tomfoolery. But it was fun to think about.

Within the castle, there were tours in French, which we bypassed to explore on our own. There were oubliettes, cylindrical prisons for soldiers who really needed a lesson, only one way in or out, though a trapdoor at the top, also a fascinating medieval garden and a beautiful chapel, the floor kaleidoscoped with colors from the stained glass windows,

a grand stone home with impressively large dining hall, (I was thinking you could really go to town and have one heck of Christmas feast there!), canons pointed out to sea, and the oldest part of the castle, the tower itself with its fortifications at each level, which we were allowed to climb and explore to our heart's delight.

At the very top we looked out over the sea and down from the tower into the knot garden with the warm winds smelling of the sea in our faces and hair.

As a bonus, we could imagine Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis (do I have to pick?) during the epic battle from the 1958 film The Vikings, which was filmed there.

Yes, I agree. Tony all the way...with an honorable mention to Kirk. These days sailboats drop anchor in the nearby bay below the castle, and relax in its shadow.

Only in the summertime, mind you. The coast comes by its rugged appearance honestly, enduring heavy storms during the winter months. Being in the castle was a window into the lives of those who lived there, to imagine how they went about their everyday lives.

For our everyday life, we very mundanely had to stop for lunch, and in the spirit of travel chose randomly in the town of Fréhel. The high school aged young man waiting tables in a family sort of restaurant was quite fluent in English, and he wanted to practise his skills on us, even going so far as to making jokes when he brought Mike a burger, faux-apologising that "Zis is France, we has no super-size 'ere" and asking if he wanted "I do not know the word for it in English, we call this mayonnaise, for your pommes frites, erm, french fries?"

I shunned burgers, (this was Bretane, this was France!) and ordered instead one of the numerous varieties offered of Bretagne galette, a sort of buckwheat pancake, which is a regional specialty. It completely eclipsed the plate he brought, the folded lacy tanned edges hanging over the sides. Inside the hearty pancake was a fried egg, peeking cheekily though the middle, ham, and an obscene amount of that same pleasingly pungent white cheese.

With all due respect to our young waiter, I beg to differ on one of his key points: France does have supersize. Maybe they don't call it that, but if the food can't fit on the plate, it's supersized. Again, only by consuming alcohol to cut the fat and then having a defibrillator-esque espresso to restart the system got me going again.

Along the road, looking up as we crossed a bridge, we spotted another castle, this one in ruins, and walked through the trees to find it.

This is Castle Le Guildo, of the powerful Dinan family, and happily it's being restored. Right now the site is largely ruins, rocks, flowers and lizards. The castle was rebuilt in 1200, 1350, 1487, 1650, abandoned altogether in 1800, but the scaffolding tells me better days are coming once again.

It must have been quite the place once upon a time. Plus, it has a magnificent view of where the river empties into the ocean in a bay. We stood on the ramparts of a ruined castle and watched the famous tides of Brittany coming in.

Watching the tide come in doesn't sound like much of a pastime, but if you'd been there you would have watched too. There was a sand flat, with boats stranded all over it. Then the tide came whooshing in, the river began to flow in reverse, the marker buoys pulling in seemingly the wrong direction and where there had been an estuary there was a seething muddy body of water.

We made lots of geeky comments about it, practically high-fived, and went back to the car.

Our last place to visit for the day, Mike had decided (and I, still giddy over Fort-La-Latte happily agreed) would be the walled medieval city of St Malo.

St Malo is the most visited place in Brittany. Famous for its cobblestone streets and beautiful buildings, the allure of being a walled city on an island, and its fun history as a corsair and pirate stronghold, arrrrr.

And it was beautiful, but so packed with tourists we found ourselves heading for the first quiet wood and old book decor pub we could find for a drink.

As we could drink anywhere, and for less, it was kind of silly to have gone all the way out there and fought for a legal parking spot and then fought our way through the crowds and quite frankly we were pretty spoiled at this point and we kind of weren't as impressed as perhaps we should have been by one more cathedral with saint's ossuaries and stained glass windows...

Although it was pretty great, we were flat-out too tired be be all that appreciative. Too many crowds, too much rich food, and too much walking over the last day for comfort.

We idled our way through the entire length of the city, to the beaches at the end, where there were folks sunbathing as though it was the French Riviera.

Dubai has kind of spoiled us as far as beaches go, too.


As there were no pirates to liven the scene, we swam through the crowds and back to the car.

A pirate would have been good. But, one can't have everything.

Along those lines, I never did find out why Fort La Latte is named as it is. Nothing to do with foamy coffee, that 'latte' is Italian. As I understand it, 'latte' in French means lath.

Lath?

It seemed that I was to spend most of the time in Brittany mystified, lost, overfed, and generally footsore. And that I would drag the spousal unit down with me.

Which is, when you think about it, essentially par for the course for being on vacation.

I guess we were doing something right after all.

*wink*