Le Mont St Michael

Wed 19th Feb 2014

Slept for about 12 hours which was lovely and rather needed. Showered and dressed and then moved Priscilla  to empty out the toilet. Lovely. Not too smelly to be honest. Mum was not too pleased that she has learnt how to empty it! Started our walk along the river toward mont Saint Michael which took quite a long time, 3 km in all but as you could see it in the distance it felt much longer. Took about an hour in all. They had built a dam along the river so as to protect Mont Saint Michael, was lovely wood with lots of seats along the top for tourists to sit and admire the view of Le Mont. Would be gorgeous to see at night time too, all lit up. 

There was a single road connecting it to the mainland, but they were in the process of building a nice new board walk to it. The tide was out quite far so there were a lot of builders and workmen around the base of it redoing the grouting of the outer walls and reinforcing the stone. They were doing a lot of construction work at the entrance and just inside too - all in preparation for the summer. As we arrived so did a bus load of Asian tourists and it was really quite busy for ten mins until they dispersed. Must be absolutely horrendous in the summer for crowds. Old photos of it showed that you could park really quite close to it, but now parking is a half hour walk back and then there is a free bus that goes back and forth every three mins. So they have got it organised quite well. (Bus was cool too - like a train, it had steering either end so driver didn't have to turn round, just change seats.)

We went up some stairs first which took us along the outside walls - amazing views into the tiny town below and on the other side you could see for miles and miles into the distance and across the bay. The wall walk took us all the way up to the abbey on the top of the Mont. It was 9 euro each to enter the abbey, and well worth the money! It was so beautiful, gigantic halls with huge fireplaces and pillars. Very, very much like Hogwarts. And lots of little Ishma holes everywhere! We walked out onto a huge open area out the back where you could see forever and the view below was even better - beautiful green gardens all higgilty-piggilty on the side of the rocky cliff. Through another room and walk out to a cloister, so green, manicured and symmetrical. Impossible not to take a nice picture. Another room was a crypt full of huge thick pillars, and in the next a massive wooden wheel, and another with an amazing statue - a replica of the one in gold right a top the top steeple. Walked out then to the gardens we saw below before and had a banana that we had bought with us. We were starting to run out of time a bit then so headed back down and went in side a little restaurant for a tea and coffee. Mum and dad said the coffee was really nice. They had wifi in there so had an unsociable few mins of soaking up Internet and posted a blog from the other day. 18 bucks for a tea and two coffees! Walked up the street a bit and looked in a few shops - mostly tacky stuff, but one shop had all swords and old fashioned guns which were cool.

Got the bus halfway back and after filling up with fuel we set off at  about 3pm. Were a little more successful with the roads this time - apart from accidentally going through the rather large city of Rennes which was rather stressful! Finally got to the Aires we wanted to stay at for the night  and had trouble with paying. There was a little payment box before a boom gate and it wouldn't take any of our cards. A nice Hungarian man who had his own motorhome inside already said they had had trouble paying too and that they had to go into the town hall to pay. The problem was the town hall was now closed. He offered to let us in with his code but that ran the risk of neither of us then being able to get out. There was another aires in the town so we said we would try that first and if not come back. The directions in the book to this second one were not very straight forward so ended up driving around another hour looking for it. Ended up seeing the sign for aires at a petrol statin next to a shopping centre ('super u'). So figured out that the services for water, drains etc were at the petrol station and the parking was at the spur market. Went in the super market for a few bits and mum went to ask someone to check if it was safe to park there overnight. The girl didn't understand the word safe so mum had to act out a stabbing motion and made the psycho noise, to which the girl laughed and said 'no, many camera!'. So tonight we wild camped in a huge supermarket car park next to some shopping trolleys! Had leftovers for dinner and then mum and dad planned the route for tomorrow.