7/13-14: Mont Saint Michel (because it deserved another post)

simonedsouza
Jul 31, 2022
4 min read

Hi, it’s Kiera! Today I’ll be blogging about the end of our first full day in Saint-Malo and the start of our second which were spent in the beautiful island of Le Mont Saint Michel. Saint Michel is an island with a bridge to Saint-Malo and the thing that makes it special is that in the day it is fully connected to Saint-Malo but at certain times it’s fully surrounded by water. The views are breathtaking! I’ll start at the beginning of the trip, where I was struggling to drink from a bottle of fizzy water. The reason for this is because our dad wasn’t used to driving in a stick shift car because he hadn’t driven one for 17 years and stick shift cars are manual and that was the only car rental option. Luke loved it though because he likes the idea of the airplane we’re in crashing so he really enjoyed the jerks. At almost the end of the drive, my dad drove into a place he didn’t mean to and he didn’t know how to reverse so a driver behind us came and drove us so that he could move his car. We took a shuttle to Saint Michel and the tide was out so we played on the sand for a while (see pictures). When we got in it was really crowded and there were buildings everywhere (see pictures again). We checked into our hotel and the woman led us uphill and through a cool stone arch and up a lot of stairs; I didn’t think we would be able to know how to find our way back later. Our family searched for an open restaurant and we ended up going to our hotel's brasserie, but there wasn’t a discount. The food was really good and we gave the waiter a big tip because there wasn’t another waiter for such a big space and he was working really hard. My mom got two ice creams (one chocolate and one strawberry) since she didn’t realize my dad didn’t want any and me, Luke and Ryan only got one spoonful for dessert. Our dad had left early and we met him again up another big flight of stone stairs where there was a cool balcony-like area and cool holes in a small tunnel of rock where we could see the pretty sunset and now the tide was high and receding! We dropped our dad and Ryan at the hotel room and started exploring again even though it was late. In the beginning we passed by a cemetery with a lot of flowers that I had looked at, a cool chapel-like structure with stained glass and then we climbed the stairs to the Abbey, the tallest structure on the island. Our mom told us to decide if doing the Abbey audio tour was what we wanted to do with our time and we decided to do it so we had to climb a lot of stairs and then stepped into the first room. We learned a lot of things. My mom made us skip a bit of the audio tour and then we got to a part with a big wheel with echoing voices that I forgot the use for because I’m so behind on blogs. We saw a lot of cardboard monks in the Abbey.

We entered a long hallway with stairs and an arch at the end. The room to the right was a big one with orange lights and three arches on one side with monks in each one and two passageways on the other side. I got in a line to go into one and it was a really tiny room with voices and bars on one side like a prison. My mom got a picture and then we went up a big flight of stairs to a library. A lot of people were looking at it and there were blueish lights. After we listened to the recording for it we went up some more stairs and into a big room with blue lights on the ground and yellow club shapes. The last room was the tallest thing in the island, with eerie blue lights and tall towers from the inside. Off of it there was an outdoor cute rectangular courtyard with a lot of flowers and people taking pictures. We skipped a lot of the audio tour and dropped our things because our mom wanted us to leave to see the sunset (the sun sets really late in France). We walked outside and my mom said it might have been the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. We took a lot of pictures - it looked fake (see pictures). When the sun was almost gone we left because our mom wanted us to see our way back. We checked the time and it was 11:00. We brushed our teeth and got in bed. The next day: we woke up and it took a while for us to get ready - me and Ryan had to go in our pajamas to see the tide. When we were finally ready we went to breakfast at a buffet in our hotel. I had juice, croissant, applesauce and crepe with Nutella. We looked in some stores that had toy swords which Luke and Ryan liked, then I led us in exploring the island a bit more. We took a lot of pictures. We checked some more stores and then left our hotel room for the last time. Luke, me and my mom stopped at shops so that he could get a sword and shield and I could get a purple bracelet with a shiny gem covered lizard on it while my dad and Ryan brought the bags that we had packed for Saint Michel. We took our last pictures then took the shuttle back to our rental. I could see Saint Michel from the car.