Mont Saint-Michel

My girlfriend Marjorie's mom was visiting Paris for a couple weeks, so Marjorie and her mom and sister Deb and I rented a car and drove up to Mont Saint-Michel!

Mont Saint-Michel is basically a tiny island (some of the time; it's complicated) just off the Northern coast of France. Historically, there was a natural land bridge that connected it to mainland France during low tide, and this became completely covered by the sea during high tide, so you could only travel to and from the island at certain times. Nowadays they've constructed a permanent land bridge with a road on it, so you can come and go as you please. I first learned about Mont Saint-Michel way back in my highschool French textbook, and it seemed incredibly strange and fantastical then, and I kind of can't believe I actually ended up going there on a whim seventeen years later.

Slightly out of order here; a few minutes before, here we are about seven kilometers from Mont Saint-Michel. It really looks like something out of a dream or a fairy tale when you first see it, and that doesn't stop as you get closer!

Now we're in the tiny town surrounding the abbey. It was one of the most overrun-with-tourists places I've ever seen!

The town and the ramparts and everything are full of interesting angles and shapes and compositions, with lots of stairways and tiny winding alleys, and I couldn't help but take a ton of photos. This is a view of the mud flats from an window near the entrance to the abbey.

We went into the entrance of the abbey to see about taking the tour, but we decided the €8.50 ticket price was kind of ridiculous, and contented ourselves to just wander around outside, which I think was a better choice. Seeing pictures of the inside of the abbey, it's certainly beautiful, but not really different from historial and architectural things you can see for free in tons of abbeys, churches, and castles all over France.

Marjorie proclaims that the ticket price is boolsheet.

Here you can get an idea of the wide expanses of mud flats that surround the mountain during low tide. I remember in highschool learning the word for quicksand — les sables mouvants! — because that was one of the hazards that religious pilgrims faced when crossing over from the mainland.

This ridge sticking out from the abbey wall is part of some kind of neat system for bringing goods up to the abbey from down on the ground.

There are warnings everywhere about the dangers of walking around on the mud flats, but lots of people do it anyway. Something I don't remember hearing about Mont Saint-Michel in highschool is that, when the tide comes in and covers the land around the mountain, it's not just a slow, gradual rising of the water. It actually rushes in in a wave, with "the speed of a galloping horse," as we heard mentioned many times over the course of the day. So it would be bad to be caught out there in that. Fortunately, they post the time that the tide comes in every day. Pictures of the tide coming in are coming up...

Marjorie's mom, Marjorie, and Deb.

Marjorie and me.

There was a plaque near these cannons saying they were abandoned by the English army in 1434!

Oh man, I love that quicksand graphic!

Okay, after visiting the town and the ramparts and everything, we made our way to the edge of the island to see the tide come in. At this point I still didn't know that the tide comes in quickly in small waves, so I was sort of wondering why the heck a bunch of people were all showing up at the same time just to see a regular tide come in. After talking to a few people I figured it out.

This is a "before" picture, with the mud flats looking exactly as they had all day. We're standing on a stone platform, and there's basically wet sand near the foreground and a wide swath of very shallow water in the background. A few minutes later, we heard the sound of rushing water in the distance, and soon saw the waves quickly flow in. It was actually a little bit scary!

Here's a picture from the same spot about fifteen minutes after the previous. The water rushing in wasn't very violent or anything, and it did become somewhat more gradual as it reached the raised stone surface we were standing on, but it was still a really impressive thing to see and hear.

On our way out, I took another picture from the same spot as that first one, above. You can see that the area to the left of the land bridge is completely underwater now, and the same is true for the right side, beyond those cars. The place where I'm standing would've been under water a hundred or so years ago.

That's all for Mont Saint-Michel! This was one of the best day trips out of Paris I've ever taken, and the only thing that could've made it even been better would be getting killed by quicksand.