June 4, 2015 Mont St. Michel
We left around 9:30 for Mont St. Michel and arrived at around 11:00. Mont St. Michel is one of the most imposing monumental edifices in the world, sited on a granite rock in the middle of a bay surrounded by miles of sand and shifting flows of water as the tides shift.
It is a Romanesque Gothic Abbey that rises hundreds of feet with five or six levels above a town perched on the rocks below that you see for miles as you near it. The Abbey is owned and managed by the French government while the town below is a warren of tourist related businesses. The abbey is still an active religious site with monks who live and pray there. We arrived at the chapel at noon and it was full of monks and tourists performing a liturgy and service.
The government is currently constructing a new raised causeway that will not become flooded at high tide and also will reassert the traditional flows of water in the bay around Mont Saint Michel, which would make for some really dramatic experiences as the tides peak and cover the sans around Mont Saint Michel. Instead of restricting access at high tide, as the government must now do, high tide will become one of the most popular visiting time for tourists and more tourists will want to stay at the hotels near it to enjoy the changing light and water effects that occur when the tide rises, just like watching the changing colors and light and shadows at the Grand Canyon.
The cloister is considered one of the most beautiful in the world open at one end with a view of the bay and ocean. Construction of the abbey began around 900 A.D., so it is half Romanesque and half gothic, with clear leaded glass on three sides behind the alter, like at the royal chapel in Paris (Le Chatelet.)
The most interesting aspect for me was how the stone carvers cut gothic arches into the stones instead of adding them after the stones were cut as in most churches.
After exiting the abbey we sat in a small garden near the abbey’s highest level and sat and ate lunch at a place with a superb view of the bay and coast. We enjoyed the pork pate, Laval, to me and goat cheese and fesh cherries and apricot we bought in Bagnoles at the market that we ate with a baguette we bought at a boulangerie we stopped at on our way up the Main Street, Rue du Roy. We also stopped and shared a cup of ice cream (pistachio and caramel) for a break and a bit of strength.
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We made it back to our car by 3:00 so decided to stop in Avranches and see the Manuscripts made at Mont St. Michel, where they are kept in the local history museum. The history museum is a lovely new building, built into the ramparts of Avranches. Among the many interesting facts we learned by the audio tour at the museum is that the Romans named towns after the local inhabitants names, so in this area,were the Avanants and the Roman name of Avantium or some such name has been shortened to a more French sounding name of Avranches.
The other interesting fact is that most of the Roman city was covered up over the years and only began to be excavated only in the 1980’s and surprise, they found that the main church was.built On the Roman forum. That fact seems so obvious that it almost indicates a lack of knowledge of archeological history. For example, what was found under the main church and zocalo in Mexico City? The original pyramids of the Aztecs. A statement of surprise about what lies below a built city, makes me think that a people are oblivious to their own history, probably with good reason.
After seeing the manuscripts, we walked to a small park beside the.Hotel du Ville where the tourist information office and the parking lot where our car was parked and sat in an outdoor café and ordered a cider. Then we drove the 1 ½ hour drive back to Vierville-sur-Mer, arriving around 7:30 p.m.
I was hungry for a substantial hot meal and requested pasta. Suzette and I cut up 2 shallots, three cloves of garlic, two strips of pancetta, a small handful of parsley, the PPI tomatoes, and mushrooms. Suzette boiled the pasta and made a tomato sauce with white wine, some of the pasta, and the ingredients, and,we drank a bottle of Southern Rhone rose wine made with Cinsault and Syrah grapes for a great meal. We were full and it was still early, so we decided to walk on the beach, so, we drove the two miles to Omaha beach and watched all the re-in actors dressed in American uniforms own vintage motorcycles and in vintage jeeps. We spoke to two fellows from Portsmouth, England, who were driving a restored U.S. Army eep they had restored and trailed to Omaha Beach. We then decided to drive to Point du Hoc, which is the famous site where American Rangers scaled a ninety foot cliff face and held the position to silence the big German shore battery with its 6 155 mm guns. Almost all the 225 rangers were killed in two days of fighting to hold the position against a strong German counter attack until the Allied forces were able to successfully reinforce the position. It is now an American war monument.
We then drove the 5 miles back to the house in Vierville and ate a lovely salad we had made with the last of the sliced tomatoes, a beet, shallot greens,and goat cheese crumbles and dressed with an apple vinegar and olive oil dressing with shallot greens. As we ate the salad, we discovered that in our hour absence the dressing on the salad had pickled the beet, so Suzette decided to pickle three eggs with the some of the remaining beets.
Suzette also cooked the PPI strawberries and the rhubarb we had bought at Bagnoles into a compote with some sugar.
One of the things I notice about our traveling is that we share the selection of food stuffs, so Suzette participates to a much greater degree in menu selection and the dinners reflect that. I would never pick a beet for a salad and here we are eating pickled beets and eggs; a very German dish.
We ate Biscuits and a fruit cake we had bought at a biscuit factory store near Mont St. Michel in the morning where I stopped to get instructions for how to get to the parking area.
Another interesting fact is that the days are really long in June in northern France. The sun rises around 5:30 a.m. and sets around 11:00 p.m. Since i usually rise at sun up, I have been going to bed at 10:00 while it is still light out. Here is a photo of the sunset taken around 10:00 pm on June 4.
Bon Appetit
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