Mont Saint Michel

It is nearly 40 years ago (gosh where did the time go?) since I was sitting in my 8th grade French class in a hot tropical classroom in Brisbane, Australia, listening to Mrs Jerome try to teach me verb tenses, and all I can do is stare at the photo of an abbey built on a narrow peninsula that gets cut off by the tide twice a day, and it's somewhere in France, and I really want to see it.

Well, I finally made it. It is a magical place to see, like Disneyland, except it is real. Now, it's been a long time since they built a road to connect MSM to the mainland of Normandy, and the place is infested with ice cream parlors and post card racks, and overrun with tourists "checking the site off their must-see" list, but later tonight (it is now 8 pm and broad daylight, I am going to ride back over the 1.8km causeway and watch the sun set and the massive tide race back in. Yes, it is possible to believe some abbot had a vision of the archangel Michael clobbering the devil here. From a long way off it is a hazy specter, sort of like a large battleship floating off the coast. Up close, it's an extraordinary testament to faith. From the causeway you can see the light shining through the glass abbey window. Visiting it may be a bit challenging as it's all my favorite type of road: pavéés, and these ones are worn smooth by thousands of tourist feet. Hauling the bike over this, and not crashing into any tourists is a big challenge.

I rode to MSM this morning, after camping on the Baie du Mont Saint Michel in a little waterfront town of stone houses facing the sea front on in St Benoit des Ondes (St B of the waves). The shoreline ride is wonderful, as you cruise along next to the digues (dikes) and look out to sea and the oyster farms. If you want you can pull over for oyster and mussels snacks from roadside vendors. I chose to pull over in le Vivier-sur-Mer to talk to 3 touring cyclists: Harald from Germany, near Alsace, who is just finishing up a 4 week ride around France and heading back home as it's getting too hot. It was great listening to Harald speak French, as he's German, so he was enunciating the words slowly enough I could actually follow. Of course, I was up to my old tricks of speaking "troglo" French, messing up all the tenses and forgetting basic prepositions. Also met Nelly andDaniel, recent retirees to Normandy, and who are completing a 3 day ride. Later, at lunch at a creperie that was an uphill slog from St Marcan and I was hoping to heck that the restaurant would be open because things seemed dreadfully quiet around here, at 12:45pm and you can't be too fussy about le formule lunch of the day in these tiny places. Still, I met 4 pleasant West Virginians. Later I rode by Nelly and Daniel again, so after more coffee and chatting, we rode through les polders, the reclaimed farmland near MSM which is now full of farms growing corn, carrots, potatoes and garlic: all pre-salted, of course! It was amazing to ride these quiet back roads, and have MSM get closer and closer with each kilometer. Then, at MSM I chatted with Mary and Gavin, from Wales. Everyone so much fun, esp. my new French pals who patiently listened to me mangling their lovely language, and they never grimaced, not even once, trés sympa, as you'd say here, and such a change from the pretension of St Malo. St Malo looks amazing from a distance, as in from the Bus de Mer (water taxi) that Sir Gulliver and I rode over the Rance from Dinard, but it's heavily touristed and has the prices to match. After more than a week riding in central Brittany, where I was basically the only foreigner around, it was strange to be back on the tourist circuit. Still, even in "fake" St Malo I met really fun people, including a foursome of retirees from Hastings "popular with tourists since 1066" and we shared a few laughes in the overprice café where we met. St Malo is a curiosity. Basically a fort with a long history of "corsaires": pirates, and being the birthplace of Jacques Cartier who founded Quebec, so the French Canadian connection is strong, but the town itself is quite new. It was bombed to smitereens by Gen Patton in 1944 to dislodge the Germans, and 80 percent destroyed. It's impossible to believe that 20 percent of anything could have survived that, but the city was rebuilt, and only looks old from a distance. I've been in the real thing, towns like Dinan, for example, that still have their maisons du bois and other buildings from medieval times, so it was a bit odd being in a place that had been rebuilt. Still, I'm now moving into the region of France where I expect to see more monuments and reminders of WW2, after reading plaque after plaque after plaque of names like Gaston and Yves and Pierre in every Breton village I rode through that lost 20, 30, or more, "enfants mort pour la France 1914 à 1918.

Time to say goodbye to Brittany and onto Normandy.