Highlights Mont St Michel and the beaches

We put Normandy onto the trip agenda for Mont St Michel (all of us, but especially Kat) and the D-Day area (John). We had read the advice to either get to Mont St Michel early or leave it until after 3pm, but neither of these timings suited. Our AirBNB hosts just said it would be busy anytime now so we just left when we were ready and ended up with a cross country trip following a combination of the GPS and road signs. Where they differed we suspect the GPS was faster but it placed us on a number of small roads.

When we were getting close, the street signs finally matched the GPS, so we started searching for parking. When we visited in 2010 the parking was in a tidal area close to the ‘island’. Now there are a number of huge areas about 2.5km away with a free bus shuttle to the castle. This was by far the slowest part of the trip, with 2 lines of traffic converging and only one parking area open for us all. This may be because the ticket ‘machine’ was a single woman at the gate.

We had already decided to walk the 45 minutes to the island to enjoy the views on approach. The length of the queue for the free bus just confirmed our decision. There was a third option of a horse and cart, which did not go much faster than we were walking. It was easy walking and we also spotted another area to take photos from at the end of our visit and enjoyed the various views as we approached. It had looked foggy (a mixture of heat haze and pollution) from a distance but did seem to clear as we approached.

We had been advised to take a picnic, as all the review said the eating places are expensive, indifferent, and have no incentive to improve with a captive customer base. We had bought some baguettes which we ate, with fillings from home, in front of an ATM by the entrance. We found a couple of much nicer spots soon after as we approached the abbey, as well as lovely spots inside the abbey gardens.

We had sorted tickets on-line as we drove, but this saved very little time as the Abbey was not busy. Last time we ran into various tour groups as we walked around, but there did not seem to be any today. We enjoyed the views from outside although the tide was well out. The rooms were as big as we remembered and reminded us of how important the abbey had been.

As we left the area we went out to the sand and got some great views of the abbey and John took one of Katherine that she used for a Facebook post.  Then we caught a very crowded shuttle bus back to the parking area.

Julie Sommerville had recommended we also go to St Malo, but we had felt it was just a bit too far when we left home, although on reflection we would have had time. However, our alternative worked out ok. I found a seaside spot called Jullouville (I’m sure this is French for Julie S..  – JB), and we headed for there instead. We were suddenly all needing to hydrate, and we had drunk all our water, so after parking, and finding the beach, our priority was to get to a café. It proved to be a lovely beach of the NZ style, so there were no places selling food or drink on the beach. There were heaps of family groups having fun. However, we spotted an ice-cream stall being set up on the promenade above the beach which also had a café near it. We paid “café by the beach” prices for cokes and fruit juice, but we also had a bottle of water and a toilet stop, so it met our needs. We also had very flavoursome glaces, which we ate as we strolled to the water for a paddle, before returning to the car. We didn’t all have swimwear with us so that was enough.

I tried with limited success to give us a coastal drive back to our base. A couple of spots, where the map indicated water would be next to us, turned out to have greenery or sand instead. We did know there were beaches near our base, so I checked with Alex and Dave when we got home to find one was only about an 8-minute drive away. They also said a nearby village was having a festival and there were fireworks scheduled for 11pm. We decided to go to the beach later, to check it out, and to watch the sunset.

Tea was home-prepared pasta, salad and packaged desserts with wine, on the picnic table, which was nice and relaxed. At about 9pm we drove to the beach. It was another lovely long beach and nearly deserted although numbers grew as the sun dropped. We walked towards the sea and went through an area between tides that was full of clear, tiny, jumping creatures. Alex later told Katherine that she knew what we meant but could not recall the name, but we checked and think they are sand fleas. They were not the most comfortable to walk through but we are sure they disliked us walking thought them also. After we left the water we did a more direct route back to the dry sand to spend less time in the “flea zone”.

There was a small group on the beach with a couple of metal detectors and they did seem to be getting signals as they stopped a few times to dig. We then sat on a seat and found a cache and watched the sun set. It was lovely. We then headed home with plans for a beach visit the next afternoon.