| Dublin | Holyhead | Iona | Portree | Orkney |
Mont St. Michel, June 4, 2005
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By now, we're getting in the rhythm of this. We get up, have
breakfast (both hot and cold buffet lines), pack the back packs, exit
the boat (the photo ID cards are part of the rhythm now), climb on a
bus, take a nap, wake up an hour later at some neat place. Here we are outside Mont St. Michel. You may remember stories about only being able to get here at low tides - you can see there now is a causeway, so that's not an issue. The bad news is that there are no elevators inside - and the neat places are at the top of the hill. |
| We've got the usual gaggle of tourists gathering in the "foyer". That's also because the rest rooms are just the left of this wall, so people are waiting for others to empty out the morning coffee. |
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As you can see, even though this was intended as a religious retreat, they are also fully prepared to defend it. Looks flat here - but don't count on that continuing. |
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Just to the right, you have our guide (with the paper "flag" in her hand)
telling us more about this (actually, giving us a rest break, but who talks
about that). On the far right, you can see the actual entrance to the
castle itself (and just about the last set of stairs).
Well, not really, because the castle is really 3 levels, the top is for the religious (chapel, chapter house), the second is for the nobility, the bottom layer is the working layer. |
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The chapel is Romanesque construction, and doesn't have the usual
stained glass windows. From the porch outside the chapel, you can see down to the garden at the working level. |
| The abbey was constructed right at the mouth of a river. This is a
tidal river, so not a source of fresh water. The causeway has blocked the cleansing tides, so the area is silting up (see far right). There's talk about building a bridge, but no idea how you get the silt out once the tides could do their thing again. |
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The far left is the garden between the chapel and the chapter house. The immediate left is the refectory. Since this place only had 60 some monks, there's a lot of room available here. |
| We left Mont St. Michel before the crowds became too bad and came back to the boat for lunch. Right across the pier from our ship was the walled city of St. Malo. We had free time to tour it. We took some of that time for a self-guided walk, then came back to the ship to catch up on journaling (Marnie) and picture editing (me). |
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The beach was very exposed (low tides at this time) so you can see
attacking from here would be difficult. Oh, yes, ... there's a reason we had free time here, we had to wait for high tides before we could exit the harbor. The harbor has a lock, and at this time, we couldn't exit the low side of the lock without wheels under the boat. |
| Streets were mostly one way (for good reason) in St. Malo.
There's a very pretty cathedral in the center of town (far right), but we couldn't get in. The crowd outside the door is waiting to greet the bride as she entered (about 10 minutes later). |
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| Dublin | Holyhead | Iona | Portree | Orkney |
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