Nice Monday 8th Sept

 Monday 10th June Arromanches to Dinan

What are those balls in the trees I’ve been thinking, they are too loose to be nests, but they seem to be on a few different types of tree. Today I thought it again, and then our tour leader told us. It is Mistletoe ! Who knew that? It’s apparently not harmful to the trees but they do live off them. 

This is the first day we have had some rain, got a bit wet when we had a comfort break but as we got closer to Mont St Michel it started to fine up a bit.

The car park is quite a way even from the causeway, but they have shuttle buses to take you to and from, we got a bit of a polar blast as we got off the shuttle until we managed to get through the gates. 

They are updating all the surrounds as the previous bridge caused issues with the surrounding salt marshes which are really good for raising sheep. There is a lot of information in the Information Centre (funny that) about how they re routed the river and have a way of damming the water when the tide comes in and then letting it out slowly.

Going in to the town is free, but it is really just souvenir shops and restaurants, but you pay to go into the Abbey, we had audio guides, that were interactive and would show you you how the rooms would have looked when it was first a monastery, building began in 708, and it was given to the Benedictines by Richard 1st. After the Revolution it was a prison for a while, and then was left for a while but became a practising monastery again in the 1960’s. 

There were many steps up to the Abbey and then many more once you were inside, the audio guide was good and lead you from room to room. 

The main thing about the Abbey is that it is incomprehensible how they managed to build it, how they actually got the materials up the rock to start with, how many rocks would fit in their boats I wonder?

Some of the mighty columns that hold up the  below.

This is a relic of the time of the prison, it was a pulley to bring up supplies from below, it was powered by human Guinea Pigs who walked the wheel!

There is one area in the Abbry where you can actually see the rock that it was built on, Ther are few places that the rock can actually be seen. 

Some nice art work displayed as we come to the end of the tour

 

Then it was out through the gardens, Mr Seagull was waiting to have his picture took, still quite high up the island.as a peek through an arrow slit shows. Apparently the English were never able to take this Island fortress, too easy to get lost in the quicksand I suppose 

After leaving Mont-Saint-Michel we travelled towards Dinan via a Windmill,we could look back towards MSM from here across the fields, by this time the sky’s were turning blue, and it was getting warmer

Then it was a stop at a Menhir in the middle of nowhere, Champ Dolent Menhir, been in place since the Neolithic period. 9.30 metres high and up to 8.70 metres in circumference, it was dug from a quarry 4 kilometres away, so that must have taken some effort, unless  Obelix and Asterix did it!! One of my fellow tourists took the photograph of me, it just gets the whole Menhir in, the ones of he took of his wife didn’t though, I wont mention it!

Then on we went to our destination for two nights Dinan, this is the view out of my window into the towns main square 

The view from the hotel’s garden which backs on to the ramparts - the city wall. We had a group dinner at a Creperie, Galettes first, that is a buckwheat pancake, usually savoury mine was goats cheese and honey, then a crepe, I had strawberry confit on mine, all washed down with a bowl of cider, a wide topped cup really, but was an Enjoyable evening sampling the local fare.