Thursday, July 2

Today, we went to Mont-Saint-Michel. We left the hotel at 7:30 am and didn’t return until 6:00 pm, which gave us four hours there. This is the farthest we’ll go from Honfleur on this tour. I noticed today that the Prime Meridian is about 30km west of Honfleur. Crossing the Prime Meridian just doesn’t have the same cachet as crossing the equator.

Mont-Saint-Michel is a bit overwhelming. Our guide did an excellent job of giving us the history of the place, but it’s like drinking from a firehose. I’ve retained only a small percentage of it. Trying to pay attention to her while looking at everything, trying to see as much as I can, is a recipe for overload.

The place is so widely known, I think everyone has a mental picture of it. It’s on a small, rocky island just offshore. The tide here is extreme. Our guide said nine meters; Wikipedia says fourteen. For most of a thousand years, you needed a boat to reach it at high tide but could walk there over the mud flats at low tide. Beware the quicksand, though! People are not allowed out on the mudflats without a guide, and children are taught how to spot quicksand.

All the stone for all the structures on the island came from other islands. Imagine, a thousand years ago, quarrying rock on that island, loading it on a boat, then carrying it to the top of this island to build the abbey. There are similar islands nearby, but I wonder if there was once one more island than there is today.

For a while, Mont-Saint-Michel was accessible by a causeway. That was recently removed and replaced by a bridge. The causeway interfered with the flow of water and was creating problems. We arrived not much after high tide, and by the time we left, the water was quite distant from the island. I would have loved to be able to walk on the mud flats.

Our guide told us France is the most visited nation in the world and that the Eiffel Tower is the most visited attraction in France and that Mont-Saint-Michel is the second most. [She was close. France is the most visited nation, but Disneyland Paris is the most visited attraction. The Eiffel Tower is 3rd, and Mont-Saint-Michel is 17th.] We had a long wait for a shuttle bus to take us from the parking lot to the island. Once there, we were swept through the place by the enormous crowd, ascending ramps and climbing stairs, past restaurants and gift shops as you climb.

Once in the abbey, you follow a single route through the enormous, labyrinthine structure, finally exiting through the gift shop (of course!). I can’t even come up with an estimate of how many people were there. I’m generally annoyed by big crowds. The whole island was crawling with people, but you could never see very many of them at the same time.

The place is an architectural and engineering marvel. Begun in the tenth century, before f=ma was a thing, before calculus was dreamt up, when Material Studies wasn’t a science but just trial and error applied over centuries. The oldest structure is at the top: it’s built from the top down!

It has the third-oldest Gothic arch in existence. Luckily, it was spared destruction in World War II. It was a tourist attraction for German soldiers, but off-limits to Allied soldiers except for a handful of American officers. Hemingway was here in 1944 and is said to have drunk all the alcohol in the place.

After the tour, we had time to visit the shops and grab a bite to eat. I had a crepe with egg, cheese, and “chorizo”. This is one of those many cultural differences, much like my experience with “BBQ burgers” in Belgium last year. The chorizo turned out to be more like pepperoni. The cheese was something like Swiss, the egg was sunny-side up, and the crepe wasn’t rolled up but had the edges folded over, making it square. I accompanied this with a (Belgian) beer. It was quite tasty.

Side note here. We looked for snacks at a small grocery store a couple of days ago. I spotted a jar of “BBQ sauce,” which looked to be the same stuff I experienced in Belgium. At Omaha Beach, I saw a place that claimed to have “authentic BBQ”. I was tempted to go inside to get the true story, but we didn’t have time. I’d be surprised to find anything like authentic BBQ sauce on this continent. No worries: I didn’t come here to have BBQ.