Day Ten: Mont St. Michel et St. Malo

We left in the early evening of Friday for the area around Mont St. Michel.  It is a miracle in the water, a monastery constructed on top of a pile of rock with a winding street of stores and residences leading to it behind a wall.  It reminded me in a smaller scale of the Kingdom of Gondor in the movie version of Lord of the Rings.  A religious community from Jerusalem still maintains liturgical and prayer life there.

You have to walk a few kilometres after you park in order to get there.  That's good.  It still has a bit of the feel of a pilgrimage.  We stayed overnight in the area and then ventured up to the monastery on Saturday morning.  The monastery reveals significant design sophistication and a complex cultural and economic life as well as the beat of prayer ever present at its centre.

The quadrangle in particular was miraculous -- a beautiful garden next to the church hundreds of feet above the ocean.  The tides there leave a great shoal of sand at low tide.

After the better part of the day there, we went on to St. Malo an old maritime town for a walk and supper.  Supper was traditional seafood:  snails, crab, oysters and what looked to me like cray fish.  Desserts were great!  I had a meringue in a vanilla creme Anglais that was A1.  It was a really long drive home.  We arrived in the wee hours of the morning.