Mont Saint-Michel Adventure

I have been intrigued by the mother of all tourist traps for a while now. True, it's a bit hard to get to, and that was part of the reason why I hadn't been yet. I waited until I had in friend in town who really wanted to see it before planning a trip. It's about four or five hours drive from Paris. We looked into bus trips direct from Paris, but that would mean joining a tour. Unless the tour would promise to take us to back alley kebap stands, I'm alright with independently getting there, even if it means a little creativity.

I found that you could take the TGV to the city of Rennes, and then hop a bus from there that takes you to the Mont. It was fairly easy, and the layover between the train and the bus meant we got to walk around Rennes for a bit and eat pastry.

Two hours on the train, a bit over an hour on the bus through the Brittany countryside, and we arrived. There's no town around le mont, but a handful of tourist hotels on the country road that leads to the causeway.

So, they are doing mad amounts of construction as they are building a new bridge to replace the causeway. The old causeway blocked the tidal flow in the bay and created enough silt build up so that the abbey is no longer technically on an island. Once the new bridge is built, they will take out the causeway and the parking lot at the base of the island, and it will once again be a tidal island.

They also built a snazzy new dam that they are using to flush out the bay and deepen the channel. It's designed to be a nice viewing platform as well. Very slick.

The Mont itself is a sight to behold.

Since the 8th century, there has been a monastery at the top of the hill, and it's been a pilgrimage site for just as long. It's portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry, including the knights getting trapped in quicksand! About 40 people live on the island, most of them being monks or nuns as it is still a working monastery.

You can take a shuttle right up to the base of the mont, or you can walk or bike the 1km across. We opted for the walk just to spend more time taking it all in. Hopping a shuttle bus for the last mile seemed very anti-pilgram of us.

A touch of rare blue sky....

The weather in Normandy and Brittany was predictably between dreary and miserable. Wearing a rain jacket is a pretty good idea no matter what the forecast says.

The delicious stink of the sea was all around us. I miss that living in Paris.

You enter the city through a gate, and you wind your way through a tiny, steep street filled with cute medieval buildings and shops.

Mere Pollard has a monopoly on most of the real estate here. They sell their ridiculous 30 euro omeletes at their fancy place at the bottom of the hill, and every other shop has their name on it. The cuisine is pretty limited anyway, as you will get sick of crepes if you spend more than a few hours here.

The views from the top were pretty spectacular. The bay, the sea, the farms and fields. They've done a really good job of preserving the area from development and spoiling the views. If this would have been anywhere else, I feel as there would be condos touting their view of the landmark built up everywhere. Instead, the sheep get the majority of real estate is given to the sheep that graze the salt marsh.

The abbey is a Unesco site, so it's well-funded and well maintained. We ended up going later in the day, so it was fairly quiet, with none of the crowds I thought we would be fighting through.

I would dare to call it peaceful even.

I'll have more pictures for you of the Abbey tomorrow. As usual, I have way too many pictures for one post.

Bayeux Market

When we were Bayeux, we stayed at a lovely little inn called Sainte Croix.

Very cute place. I would hesitate to call it Victorian in style (I don't know what they called that frilly and modest period in France).

It sat right on a giant tree-lined parking lot, which served as kind of a town square, where the weekly market takes place.

We found out quickly that they enjoy their sweets in Normandy. Breakfast was lovely and good, but sorely lacking protein. I knew we were in trouble when baskets of bread, croissants, slices of brioche and jam were laid in front of us. Later came the pot du caramel and malty sweet waffels. Enough already! I need an egg! I don't eat that much sugar and carbs in a week, never mind at the breakfast table. Still...it was tasty.

The market had a lot to offer. We enjoyed sampling and chatting to the cider and calvados producer who sent us home with a crate of his goods. Being somewhat in the countryside, they sold livestock!

There was a vendor who sold tiny little songbirds.

There was also the typical food and produce vendors.

The locals line up at the Chevaline stand. You can't usually buy horse steaks from a regular butcher, but they have specialty butchers that are exclusively dealing out Trigger and Flicka.

Afterwards, a nice walk around the town to try to re-establish healthy blood sugar levels.

Bayeux is a Great Place for Textile Nerds

A weekend away from Paris is never a bad idea.

I had wanted to go to Bayeux for ages. It's one of the only towns that didn't get demolished in that part of Normandy during WWII, leaving a quaint medieval village to wander around. Nearby cities like Caen were almost completely reduced to rubble, leaving a blank slate to be rebuilt into sprawling industrial and port cities in cold post-war architecture. It's kind of a tourist town, but it wasn't so busy where you felt mobbed or like you couldn't get a dinner reservation.

The city is crowned with an enormous thousand year old gothic Cathedral.

They don't grow grapes here, so cider becomes the Champagne drink of choice. It's usually very cheap- $3-$4 euros for a bottle, and it's very drinkable. It goes nicely with the fresh oysters and the savory buckwheat crepes called galettes that you can get pretty much everywhere.

I badly wanted to visit the Bayeux Tapestry. It's a very unique work of art from the 11th century. It's not a tapestry at all, but a long linen cloth stitched together and embroidered with great detail and embellishment.

(All tapestry images courtesy Wikipedia since photos were not allowed and I tend to take the preservation of these things seriously. It annoys me to no end that some vistors decided to perserve their memories via their Iphones despite getting yelled at by security.)

It used to hang in the nearby cathedral, but it was moved into a special museum where it could be in climate controlled perfection.

It's basically a comic book for the illiterate, which, in the 11th century, chances are you weren't spending too much time learning how to read.

It tells the story of William the Conquer. Well, he was actually known as William the Bastard when the story starts, and ends up becoming William the Conquer. He was the Duke of Normandy, and he decided he was the rightful heir of the throne of England as well and went off with his troops to give the usurper Harold a royal ass kicking. The battle of Hastings is portrayed with much violence and detailed stitching- blood and severed body parts and gore.

It's basically a propaganda piece to convince the British populace that William was the good guy in all this, and despite the fact that the dying heirless King Edward said the crown should be passed to Harold.

The museum itself is fantastic. The whole tapestry is laid out in a long, unbroken arched hallway. You are given an audio guide that explains in detail what is going on, scene by scene. It was so amazing, when we were done, we went back and did it again. The boats, the battles, the quicksand in front of Mont Saint Michel, the laughing horses...it deserved a lot of your attention. Upstairs, there is a museum explaining the techniques used in the tapestry and the history of the events, and a film that shows a really convincing reenactment.

Yes, natural dye was used. Three kinds: Woad for blues, Madder for reds, and Weld for yellows, all used at different saturations to get the various shades. Here's a great website talking about the dyes and techniques used.

My favorite scene:

Hayley's comet, appearing ominously in the sky to fortel the demise of Harold, ages before people knew what a comet might really be. It's the same comet I saw in 1986 and caused me so much childhood angst about the kind of world we would live in the next time it paid us a visit.

Here, in a rather old-school web page, is the entire thing, scene-by-scene.