This morning we slept in. I woke up at 07:00 and woke up Tavis. Apparently, he didn’t snooze his alarm when it went off earlier. We were supposed to pick up the rental car at 07:00 but Tavis didn’t arrive until 07:45. While he was picking up the car I got the kids up, folded our dry laundry, and finished packing our day bag. We were waiting on the street when he picked us up in a Peugeot 308 with manual transmission and unfortunately a gas engine. At 09:45, we started on our way to Mont Saint Michel.
Just after 11:00, we arrived in Caen. We stopped at Chateau to stretch our legs. We walked to the castle and we were able to walk on the castle walls. We went up to the top and admired the view of the city. On our way back to the car, we walked through a little street with restaurants on both sides. Then we found a bakery and bought sandwiches for later.
As we drove toward the island, we were completely impressed with the size of it. It is huge! We arrived at the parking lot around 13:15. We ate our sandwiches while walking to the meeting point for our tour. At 13:45, we checked in as instructed. At 14:05, our tour guide slowly led us to the endless line for the free shuttle. Our 2 hour tour just seemed to get a lot shorter. We finally boarded the bus at 14:39 and arrived at the island by 14:55.
The English tour we purchased months ago was not what we expected. The guide spoke broken English and spent the entire time giving the tour in English, then again in French. We learned a few things and heard some stories, but you can get just as much information from reading the free signs and handouts. A lot of time was wasted with the tour which walked us up over the village and to a lookout. We had really just scratched the surface.
When we left the tour, we quickly walked through the Abby. It was very cool and it would have been nice to spend more time exploring the village, but we had a long drive back to Paris. We walked through the village on our way out of the island, just before 17:00.
We got back to the car just after 17:30. If you are planning to visit Mont Saint Michel, I recommend not doing a guided tour. Parking costs $14,00 for the first 3 hours and $3,50/hr after. The shuttle is free and there is no charge to walk around the the island. There is a lot to see! The tickets into the Abbey are $11,00 for adults and free for children under 18. I think you can do the entire thing on your own in less than 3 hours. We wasted an hour just waiting for our group to get started when we could have been to the island if we went straight there.
I’m glad we went to Mont St Michel. It was a unique experience. It would be neat to see the tide in, but it was out quite a ways. The tide goes out 15km! 30 minutes every 14 days, the island is surrounded by water from the super tide.
On the way home, we stopped at Le Mans. It was half way back and a good place to have dinner. We wanted to drive part of the track and see the hand prints of winners of the famous race. We only found the prints of 1 driver and it was getting late, so we had dinner at a local pizzeria. They got us our food super quick and it was delicious.
After leaving, we gassed up the car and located only 1 open grocery store. As it turns out, the store was in a huge mall. It was comparable to a Walmart… large stores do exist here! We bought groceries for the train tomorrow because we have to be at the train station by 07:00.
Tavis dropped us off at the apartment at 23:20, then him and Addison went to return the car to the rental company. We all showered and packed our bags for an early morning tomorrow.