Mont-Saint Michel

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Mont Saint-Michel.

Our first stop on this day was to be Mont Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy. This would be followed by a visit to Omaha Beach, site of the American Forces D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. I was excited at both these prospects. Pictures of Mont Saint-Michel had always struck a chord of wonder, rising, as it does, pyramid-like out of the sea to a perfect pinnacle formed by the spire of the abbey. What was exciting about Omaha Beach was that it was just down shore from Juno Beach, where Canadian troops had landed. We were on a special mission related to Juno Beach.

The drive to Mont Saint-Michel took about 3 hours and went through rolling Normandy farmland featuring a lot of canola and flax. Cindy drew our attention to the hedgerows that were used to separate fields, and which gave allied forces so much difficulty in their push toward Paris. We were interested to learn the difference between Limosine cattle and the unique "Normandy" breed, the main distinguishing feature of the latter being dark coloured circles around the eyes. There were a lot of both varieties grazing in the fields and the connection to these and excellent Normandy cheeses was not lost on us.

To get to Mont Saint-Michel one first arrives at a staging area in-shore, along the banks of the Couesenon River. From there a bus takes the visitor across a mile-long causeway to the island itself. There are tales of people trying to walk across the tidal marsh to the island before the causeway was built only to get caught in the incoming tide.

Ancient walls hide many things, not the least of which are narrow streets and a crush of bodies. The island receives about 3 million visitors per year and about half of them seemed to be here on this day. We pushed our way about 100 yards through the main gate and into the commercial part of the community. At that point we ran into a solid wall of humanity, turned on our heels and pushed our way back to the causeway. Some of the more spry of our group made it all the way to the entrance to the Abbey but, faced with a stiff fee to enter, retreated along the ramparts which were less busy than the alley-ways.

I was not (much) disappointed in our visit to this World Heritage Site. It was fun to see and to have actually been there, but after that – just another medieval village with an abbey on top.

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