Mount St. Michele/St. Malo

Because our destinations for the day were kind of far from where we were staying, we wanted to leave the hotel kind of early-ish. If you've ever been on a vacation with my family, you would know that we hardly left early. It was still technically morning when we left, though. That's good.

On the way out, we discovered that there was a market across the street from our hotel, so we got breakfast and salami there. We also got these like dried salami things which kind of tasted and looked like a classier version of Slim Jims. They were very good.

Anyway, we headed out towards Mont St. Michele. It was about an hour's ride out to the area and there was a lot of stress because Oppa doesn't generally trust my ability to navigate even though I managed to get us everywhere we needed to go.

Mt. St. Michele is this little medieval town place that has a very big abbey up at the top of the hill. It's a coastal city that is an island depending on the tide at that particular time. The view of the area from a distance is pretty spectacular. We got there around high tide, but I think it was waning down by the time we got there.

The actual town itself was very cute and very picturesque. Because the streets were very narrow, it felt a lot more crowded than it probably actually was. All I know was that there were certain areas that were hard to get through because it was so crowded. We climbed up the hill to get to the abbey and went inside to look. There was a great view from the top of it and the abbey itself was very gorgeous. Oppa also got us one of those free self-tour guide things to walk around with. Those are a lot more complicated to carry around than they should be.

Once we saw the abbey, we headed back down the hill. We stopped along the way to eat gallettes at this small creperie. They were very good. Mia and I also split a nutella crepe for dessert and that was kind of amazing. We bought James some ice cream on the way down (because he now eats ice cream almost constantly) and then left Mt. St. Michele.

On the way to our next stop, we found some random goose farm and Oppa bought his pate, his apple liquer, and his very smelly cheese. He was a very happy person at that moment in time.

Our next stop was St. Malo, which took some navigating to get too. We parked a little outside of town and then took a bus in. St. Malo is a cute little fortified coastal town. It was kind of similar to Rhodes in a way, except a lot less hot. And not as pretty. And there were not as many things to do. And it was smaller. So, I guess the only real thing that made it similar was that it was within a fort. It was still a very cute little town, though and after going through very hot spots like Greece, Turkey, or Egypt the cold weather was very, very refreshing.

Anyway, we looked around the town for a bit. We walked along the wall for a while, first. Then, we found some spot that overlooked the sea. It was pretty.

They also had some art stands scattered around the area and we looked at a couple of them. Mia found some really bizarre one that she liked.

We looked at a couple of other shops after that. Mia and I found some market that sold large bottles of Orangina. We got some as well as some chocolates. Good times. We wandered around St. Malo for a while afterwards, looking for a suitable place to eat dinner. We eventually found some place that did the sea food that Oppa and Umma were looking for as well as pizza because that's essentially all James eats. The food was good.

After eating, we took the bus back to the car and left St. Malo. I think we had good timing on this one because it was drizzling as we left and started raining soon after we loaded into the car. Oppa took a wrong turn somewhere on the way out of St. Malo, so we had to circle around a lot of very dark and not so crowded areas to find our way back. It worked out in a way. The road that we got lost on went in the direction of the freeway we had to take to get back to Caen.

Anyway, like we had the night before, we made it back to Caen very late. Like after midnight late. I read a lot on the way back and helped Oppa when we were changing freeways and doing things like that. It wasn't too hard finding the way back once we were on the right freeway, though.

After we got back, I was probably up until like 1 or 2 reading my book, which by this time I was very much into.