7/13-14: Fireworks!

Happy Bastille Day! Mike here - we are in Saint-Malo for a few days, but we took an overnight trip yesterday to Saint-Michel, where we woke up this morning. We traveled back in time for the late night Bastille Day festivities outside the Saint-Malo fort.

This area on France’s northern coast (west of Normandy) has pretty big swings in how much beach there is from high to low tide (6:15 half-periods). It reminds me much more of Kiawah than Long Island, which must have a steep decline before a sudden underwater cliff compared to these other areas with moderate declines. There’s a funny stretch in Saint-Malo where the water pounds a sea wall and sprays over it during high tide or offers hundreds of meters of beach only a few hours later (just halfway to the lowest tide). We’ve seen several medieval fortifications on sometimes islands that we’ve walked to during low tides.

Saint-Michel is an island fort connected by sand bridge half of the time. (They actually added a full time man-made pedestrian bridge a few years ago, but the fort clears out of tourists and restaurant employees in the evening.) I captured a video showing the tide coming in at a nearly consistent rate of several feet per minute or so as the kids played in the sand outside the fort that soon would be covered by water. I captured a screenshot of GMaps on my phone that showed the blue dot very clearly in water.

The first picture is Kiera holding a buoy just outside of Saint-Michel that is functional half of every 12.5 hours and moot the other half. Inside the fort, the small town is very vertical. Our hotel room had a lovely view (second picture from the window when I woke up). The third picture is a cool view actually from the night before. The fourth picture is from outside the fort back on sometimes sand near where Kiera had held the buoy. Though it’s a fort with holes to shoot things out of throughout the outer walls, its roots are a monastery from a thousand years ago.

When we returned to Saint-Malo, I had actually doubled my lifetime right side of the road stick driving experience with this round trip. It had been eleven years since the last time I’d driven stick, and I only cursed many times with the kids in the car (though mostly in my head). Nearly everything (the rental car agency, every gas station, most restaurants, the public bus service) was closed for Bastille Day, but we found a very accommodating restaurant for a nice and early 9:30p or so dinner with the kids. Afterwards, we enjoyed the fireworks on a stretch of beach west of the fort that’s only there some of the time when it got as dark as it would get after 11p. This is the fifth picture. A bonus piece of media in this blogpost is this video of Ryan close to midnight explaining how he had battled and defeated the fireworks:

Saint-Malo traces back as a haven for state-sponsored pirates in medieval times. By the Renaissance, it was an important harbor for even more mainstream seafaring because it’s about as far west a non-English port as you can get that serves Northern Europe. The Nazis were able to hold it for several months after you’d guess (as the Allied forces quickly used Normandy as entry to central/ eastern France and Belgium, just skipping more of northwestern France as a low priority), and it was actually the US that had to bomb it late in 1944. Today, the fort (the old town) is a local French bustling tourist spot while the suburbs (where we stayed a couple miles to the east of the fort) feel like a sleepy beach town.

However, the buildings suggest otherwise. The other houses look like our AirBnB — it’s built from stone with sophisticated storm windows and a slight elevation prepared for flooding; it has no fans (nor AC) because the July temperatures are the hottest on record (until next year, probably/ unfortunately). One last thing about Saint-Malo in mid July is that it doesn’t get very dark. We’re not in the arctic circle or anything, but we’re pretty far west within CET and all of France’s height north of NYC (fun counter-intuitive factoid is that Madrid is the same latitude as NYC). Besides the nearly 10:30p sunsets to go with early sunrises, there’ve been very full and large orange moons and it hasn’t been all that dark even in the middle of the night.