Today we woke up around 7:30 and had breakfast at the house. Then Don and I went to the store to get snacks for the bus. The bus picked us up at 10 am and we had a different driver named Damien. He was very nice and spoke very good English. He also was more of tour guide and told us a lot of information about everywhere we went. He was very good.
We stopped at a rest stop that put all USA rest stops to shame. It was like a palace—there was a restaurant with roasted pork shoulder, amazing looking sandwiches, a very nice gift shop, and of course a Starbucks.
When we got back on the road Damien asked if we wanted a surprise and we all did. So he stopped off a road that had a view of Mont Saint Michel in the far background. In the forefront were pastures with sheep everywhere. It was very beautiful, like a postcard; in fact I’m pretty sure you can get this exact view on a postcard. We took a lot of pictures here and Mont Saint Michel just looked like a castle.
Before coming to France I did not know much about Mont Saint Michel. I had really only seen pictures, and funny enough, one time when we were playing GeoGuessers it dropped us at Mont Saint Michel. Basically Mont Saint Michel is a commune that sits on an island off the mainland of France. The tides around the island are also interesting because it made it accessible but also stranded enemies. The low tides protected the island and it was never conquered. We took some pictures of people walking on the sandvery far from the island during low tide.
When we made it to Mont Saint Michel we had about a 20 minute walk to get there. It was a beautiful walk and we took a lot of pictures. Damien guided us up to the top of Mont Saint Michel and told us a lot of history on the way. It was a very good tour.
Once we made it to the top we walked back down to the town for free time before we had to head back. I think we had almost an hour of free time and of course I was hungry. We found a sandwich shop and got a sandwich. We walked around the town a bit but what we saw of it was so crowded and touristy so we decided to stop at a place with a view and get a drink (wine).
After an hour we all met up for the trek back to the bus. We wanted to take the shuttle back to the parking lot but it was so crowded and we waited 20 minutes and still were not able to get on the shuttle. So we started to walk back. The walk felt long and it actually got hot!
It was a long but fun day. On the way home we stopped and picked up some sandwiches because we would be getting home late. When we got home we all just relaxed, ate, and talked. Around 11 pm I got some news about work from a coworker and it was pretty exciting so I went to see if Julie was still awake to talk about it! She was!