Day 24- Friday 1 July

Ex-ci-ting, this is us on our way to Normandy, and everyone by now has figured out how to be on time despite random metro closures, weird bus schedules and occasional, unannounced, sometimes localized strikes. Somehow I'd gotten the impression that we would be taking the train, so, in my usual weekend-explorer fashion I'd come with my habitual backpack, two cans of ravioli and spare pair of socks only to find we had a bus rented for the duration, and two girls actually had small suitcases, but oh, well:

Just for reference, the next two photos are the front and back of le Mont Saint Michel, a highly geologically-irregular structure in the midst of a delta and fields of edible sheep [many a future gyro munching the salty plains, mmm] upon which a fortified abbey has existed in some form for over a thousand years, great day trip:

had to walk on the delta bit, of course, which I found out has quicksand in spots, but no worries:

see? flat:

los touristas:

Now we're inside the abbey, and here you can see a bit of the main staircase-entrance below, I'm currently up on the terrace, and there's a bit of building crossing over to the wall there:

This is the chapel of the abbey as seen from the terrace:

Now we're inside:

A tourist on the terrace and the delta at low tide:

The windows you can see at the end of this cloister garden were fantastic, because the whole thing is maybe a bit under two hundred feet up at that point?

After completing the tour, wandering around the mont for a while, then the sand, eating my can of pasta perched on a wall, I met up with the group at the end of the day and asked a friend to take a photo of me. Handing it off, I dropped my camera, and, sadly, three feet of uninterrupted gravity were enough to rob it of function, which is sad because, after driving to Caen, checking into the hotel and getting two genial temporary roommates, we went to dinner at a French restaurant and I had escargot, bouillabaisse, and fondant au chocolat, all of which were ridiculously photogenic, though I don't like fish soup it turns out [but the gastropods were fab, as was the chocolate cake, and the bouillabaisse was a must-try French dish that had cute mussels in their shells poking out, along with a hunk of salmon and some white fish, and two very sweet shrimp, though mine did not have eyeballs like my neighbor's appetizer]. It took a while to serve us, being twenty four in number, three courses each plus coffee at the end, and I think we all slept pretty well. Those snails were so good.