St. Malo, Mont St. Michel, France
We are traveling ever further south, along the western coast of France. Today we arrived early in the morning to St. Malo, where we had to wait for our turn to enter the locks that were to elevate us to the level of the inner lake. This brought us to the doorstep of the old city of St. Malo, with its lovely old houses. Many of them are still the original constructions of hundreds of years ago, but about 90% of them had to be reconstructed, due to the bombardment during WWII. Today the city gives us its special taste, with a lot of history. Pirates, or better called privateers, very rich merchants, important people like Chateaubriand, etc…
But our first trip of the morning was to drive to St. Michel and visit the incredible abbey, built on this small island. The abbey has an incredible history, from being founded early in the eight century, to being abandoned as an abbey and transformed into a museum. Some of us walked all the way up to this abbey, others just visited the old town at the base of the hill. A great number of tourists from all over Europe walked along the tight little path up to the abbey, stopping at different restaurants, shops and small hotels along the way. Shortly before lunchtime we all met back at the buses for our hour-long drive back to the ship.
After this hurried repast, we again found ourselves outside our ship and ready to walk into the town of St. Malo. Here we heard about the history of the town, and eventually made our way back to the ship, where we prepared for recap. But before this event, w e had the opportunity to try one of the most famous delicacies of the area: the famous oysters of this part of the country, Concal, together with an interesting white wine, they tickled our appetite for dinner!
