Day 6/7- Mont St Michel

The Mont St. Michel Monastary/Castle is truly amazing!

We began our pilgrimage Saturday morning when we traveled from Lorient to Mont St. Michel in the 9 person van. We stopped on the way at Buffalo Grill, which is the French take on the wild west culture.

As you approach Mont St. Michel, you can see the outline of a monumental castle built out in a river basin.  And as you get closer, you realize just how big and amazing this castle truly is.

We checked into our hotel and then quickly made it up and into the castle just in time make it to Vespers, prayer service of the singing monks in the abbey of the church which is at the very very top of this very high monastery. They only open the doors for the service for a few minutes, so we were so fortunate to be at the right place at the right time.  It was a beautiful service that was almost entirely in song – the best part (at least for Alex and Belinda) being the “Notre Padre”, or the Lord’s Prayer, which was sang in french and was incredibly moving.    It was 45 minutes long in which we also needed to keep a 2 year old very very quiet.  There were moments where I thought we were doomed, but in the end I don’t think we disturbed the monks or even those around us too much.  The big kids thought it was boring, although Alan said “beautiful and boring”, but they were very good and I think will remember it.

https://youtu.be/ylSCoydN1Yg

After Vespers we made our way down the castle by travelling along the outer wall and ramparts.  We really liked seeing the holes for archers (long up and down slots), holes for guns (small round holes), holes for cross bows (sideways slits), and the holes for pouring boiling water/tar etc (slits on the floor).  We decided to leave the Mont for dinner since we knew we would be back the next day. In the parking lot Charlie decided to slide along the gravel and skin his knee pretty bad.  A two hour dinner just didn’t seem like a good idea since the kids wanted to play, so we stopped at a small grocery and picked up a few things for Matt, Belinda and the kids to eat for dinner back at Hotel Rose in Beauvoir and we let Alex and Nate have a date night at a restaurant close by.  The Hotel Rose was a very quaint and cute place in which each family had cute little glass bungalow cabins.  The smaller cabins were more like huts with grass growing up one side and on the roofs.  It was fun to do a little “glamping” and couldn’t beat the location since it was only 4 km from the Mont.

The next morning Matt went to the bakery next door and got chocolate chip baguettes and regular baguettes to go with the leftover fruit from dinner the night before.  Our plan was to arrive back at the Mont around 9:30 which was when the tourist office was open to hopefully get a sand tour before the tide rolled in.  Unfortunately they didn’t have any tours that morning because the tide would start to come in around 11.  So we decided to walk around the sand/mud bar around the Mont and make our way to a viewing spot to watch the tide come in and make the Mont an island.  The kids had a wonderful time climbing on rocks and playing with mud.  We were a bit overly scared about getting caught out in the tide, so we were in our viewing spot way ahead of when we needed to be.  Luckily we were able to view a movie shooting in the sand just below us.  We kept wondering- don’t they know the water is coming?  All that expensive equipment.  In the end they knew more than us since the water really didn’t start coming in til noon and in the end it was a low tide coeffcient which meant it wasn’t as powerful or as fast as other days.  And in the end the water didn’t make it all the way around the castle- apparently we picked the wrong week because next week there will be huge tidal waves; oh well. after watching the tide come in, we decided to do a little tourist shipping since Lily had her eye on a t-shirt from the day before and Melanie found some green glass earrings that are just her style.  After that we said goodbye to Mont St. Michel.

We decided to picnic again for lunch but saw a Friterie (french fry stand) just outside the parking lot of Mont St. Michel.  That seemed like a good idea, so we stopped and started to unload, but as Belinda started to order we got a taste of French hospitality when we were told we could not picnic at their tables even if we did buy something.  I think if Alex would have been ordering it would been different than my American accent, but all well, we left and found a picnic area only a few kilometers away.

Can’t say enough about the wonder of Mont St. Michel.  I’m so glad we all got to experience it.