France Day 2 | Le Mont St Michel
(Fuji XT-3)
Continued from France, Day 1:
Figuring out how to tell the (only French-speaking) firemen what was going on, with my passable but limited French and the help of the hotel concierge, was a circus. Communicating that I had just been through a major trauma and feared I was suffering residual effects or had somehow been reinjured by air travel…well, I didn’t have the appropriate vocabulary to manage that in French and something seemed to be getting lost in translation. In fact, even looking up the term vertebral artery (dissection de l'artère vertébrale) wasn’t helping. It was like they’d never heard of the condition.
In the end, my blood pressure was normal and after consulting with a doctor by phone the firemen felt I’d be ok. They offered to take me to a hospital but also said it is not uncommon to feel this way after travel. So I opted to wait it out and they left after securing Erika’s promise to stay in the room with me and to call them back if things got worse. Then we slept.
(Fuji XT-3 w/ Lensbaby 45 SOL)
Our plan was to wake up early the next morning and walk up to the abbey, stopping on the way to watch the tide rush in. I woke up feeling better, but still dizzy and foggy, so we had breakfast at the hotel. It was overpriced but pretty tasty. Lots of adorable mini croissants (of which we snagged several to stash in our backpacks for later) and cheeses.
We thought we were up plenty early enough, but when we got high enough to see the surrounding mudflats, we realized the tide was already completely in. I’d failed to intuit that we should have been in place like an hour BEFORE high tide on the time table. Duh. Not that it mattered though. It was so foggy and drizzly that we could barely see anything. Still, it was beautiful and peaceful.
(Fuji XT-3 w/ Lensbaby 45 SOL)
We continued on up to the abbey where we waited in line with more people than I would have imagined could even fit in the hotel rooms available on the island. The island wasn’t open to day tours yet, so only the guests staying overnight on the island were allowed to be on the site this early. It was pouring rain and the line to get into the not-yet-opened abbey was already trailing down a mountain of steps. I found myself huddled into an alcove chatting it up with a sweet couple from Canada.
(Fuji XT-3)
(Fuji XT-3)
(Fuji XT-3)
Finally, the abbey opened and we purchased our handheld audio guides and started on the tour…after another thousand steps up the mountain. The abbey was incredibly beautiful. The tour leads you up thru the highest point where you have a sweeping view of the bay and the grazing sheep on the banks (side note: everyone told me to try the lamb because it has a totally different flavor because of the salty grasses it grazes on, but we just didn’t have it in us to put forth the effort to find a restaurant that served it).
(iPhone Xs)
(iPhone Xs)
These umbrellas were designed to not break in the wind. Well, they lived up to the claim, but we did struggle with them flipping inside out a ton…If you followed my Instagram stories you caught a glimpse of the comedy show this was.
Sheep grazing (Fuji XT-3 w/ Lensbaby 45 SOL)
(Fuji XT-3)
Community art project expressing what MSM means to the people of the region. (Fuji XT-3)
(Fuji XT-3)
The gardens outside the abbey at the end of the tour were my favorite.
Going down was harder than going up. The rain, wind, dizziness and my lingering knee injury (another casualty of the car accident: fractured tibia, bone bruising, and a severely sprained MCL that is still not healed as I type this) made the endless steps and cobblestone alleys difficult to ascend, but the descent felt downright treacherous. I took it super slow, hugged the walls, and stopped often.
(Fuji XT-3 w/ Lensbaby 45 SOL)
(iPhone Xs)
(iPhone Xs)
(iPhone Xs)
(iPhone Xs)
We made it back to the hotel in time to check out and decided to go ahead and get going back to Paris. The constant rain was really a downer and we hoped maybe we would get ahead of it and maybe stop somewhere else (like Bayeux or Honfleur) on the way. There was no shuttle back to the parking lot, but there was a maringote (horse-drawn carriage) waiting. So we hopped in to escape the rain and rode it back to the parking lot.
(Fuji X70)
(iPhone Xs)
(Fuji X70)
But it just rained and rained the whole way back, slowing our progress. We actually did end up just five minutes from Honfleur thanks to crazy off-ramp that looked like the turn into a gas station we were trying to stop at. We briefly considered stopping, but with the weather, we really just wanted to make it into Paris before dark. Our only stops were at gas stations, though we did have rather impressive (for a gas station) lunch.
(iPhone Xs)
(iPhone Xs)
Joke’s on use though! We should have just continued on to Honfleur. Because after we dropped off the car at Charles de Gaulle, we spent a full two hours in a cab stuck in traffic because of a wreck. We finally rolled into our hotel in Paris at 11:30 pm. Wet, bedraggled, and so ready to be settled in one place for the next 2 weeks.
Overall, while I am glad I got to see Mont Saint-Michel and truly enjoyed driving through Normandy, I can’t help but feel like this side trip was a colossal waste of time and money. But at the very least, I’ve learned my lesson and will never again try to pack so much into the first day of a trip.
(iPhone Xs)
Oh, and the pièce de résistance? We ended up with a speeding ticket. Even though we knew that speed limits were strictly enforced with an abundance of traffic cameras and thought we were extra careful to learn and observe the (relatively confusing) rules of the road. A traffic camera caught us going 7 Km/h over and I received the fine notice at home last week (almost two months later). I couldn’t help but laugh and shake my head as I paid the 45 euro fine.
Have you spent any time in the French countryside? Have you driven in a foreign country? Bonus points if you got a speeding ticket too. Tell me about it in the comments below!