Le Mont St Michel New Year

When the Ragazzi and I took our first holiday together as a threesome, nineteen years ago, we chose to come to Brittany. 

It was such a stressful trip but such a huge adventure for us: the first time I'd driven abroad, the first time we'd crossed the Channel without their father, my ex, the first time we'd been to Brittany, the first of so many firsts... 

Despite all of that, it was a wonderful week and it showed me that life would go on and we could continue to thrive and be happy.

Fast forward to 2018, the Ragazzi are now adults leading their own lives in the UK and I am living in Brittany alone. If you ask me, I'll admit to having unknowingly sown the seeds for my move to France back in 1999 but it would take me nineteen years and one false start, before I'd be able to make Brittany my permanent home. 

At least for now... 

On that first trip we crossed from Portsmouth to Caen on an overnight ferry and then drove down through Normandy to Mont St Michel to spent our first day there. The first of many, we made a habit of calling there on every subsequent holiday to Brittany. 

Fitting then, that on the last day of this year I should return to spend a night on Mont St Michel. 

I chose to stay at La Mère Poulard because The Rags and I had spent my 50th birthday weekend in Room 205 and it holds happy memories for me - always a good reason to return when I am alone.

And it is a very unique hotel and just oozing with history and tradition.

My room was on the top floor, the two windows on the right as you look at the picture, so it was lovely and peaceful when I closed the windows to quieten the noise made by the excited tourists milling around outside the hotel and taking pictures through the windows of the spectacle of the famous Mére Poulard omeletes being cooked. 

Peaceful, but almost one hundred steps to my room which provided a heart-pumping workout each time I went up to my room and an arthritic-knee-aching ordeal each time I descended again. I didn't mind, I just needed to take a deep breath and pause on each landing...

The view from the window at the side of my room looking out over the roogtops of the medieval town was of wooden and stone tiles and little turrets and ancient stonework and quite a few pigeons in pairs preparing for spring, I think...

While the view from the front was of the causeway leading from the mainland and the surrounding salt marshes. When there is a very high tide Mont St Michel becomes an island once again, thanks tyo the work carried out in 2012 to dredge the mud and to build a barrage on the river.

I climbed to the abbey. More steps, many more steps but another excellent workout, with a few stops to catch my breath as I pretended to pause to admire the view.

 I am not religious. I'm spritiual but I find religion difficult to master. As Robert Langdon said in The Da Vinci Code, faith is a gift I have yet to receive. Or words to that effect. But I tried to pray, despite the people posing for selfies and snapping pictures all around me, tried and failed. And then, well, then I saw demons everywhere...   

And doors to places to which I was not permitted to enter...

This one, though a normal size, reminded me of Alice in Wonderland, and I was quite happy not to shrink to be able to fit through it...

In the cloisters where the monks and nuns walk in slent meditation when its not full of tourists ignoring the signs not to touch the pillars...

despite the watchful eyes of the dragons above their heads...

I'd plant a herb garden laid out in an intricate design with paved pathways edged with low box hedges and aromatic plants so that it would be a haven for bees and butterflies. 

I've visited the abbey at least a dozen times and on this last occasion I decided I probably won't return: the cardboard cut-out nativity scene near the steps leading to the entrance, the one inside the abbey's church and the tacky attempt at a festive Christmas scene in one of the halls were just not to my liking.

And it's not really an inspiring religious experience, nor is it a beautiful and calming visitor site.

I suppose it just felt cold and bleak and, well, no longer the abbey that I first visited almost twenty years ago.

Yes, I know, the abbey hasn't changed, of course it hasn't, but I have...

So, alpha and omega...
Quite fitting, n'est-ce pas?
        

I left the abbey and walked back down the hill, pausing for something to eat in a crèperie - Le Chapeau Rouge -  whose owners were surly and unfriendly and who served me the worst French soup I have ever eaten: thin and tastleless, containing barely any onions and accompanied by packet-croutons that should have floated on the top with a sprinking of grated cheese. They may have floated, had the soup not been so thin that they sank to the bottom to form a sludgy mess.

I should have sent it back and refused to pay for it.

I didn't. I was too tired to complain and the owners didn't look as if they cared anyway.

I definitely should have sent it back I told myself later when a violent stomach upset hit me, I can't be sure that it was as a result of that French onion soup, but I hadn't eaten anything else since dinner the day before so...

I rested in my room, recovered from my soup-stomach-upset and then took a long, hot bubble bath and dressed for my New Year's Eve dinner in the hotel restaurant. It was expensive, the service was not super-efficient and my beef was tough but the omelette, the famous Mère Poulard omelette was perfect. I'd have happily just eaten omelettes for all three courses and, yes, there was a desert version, had I been able to manage it...

(Pic from https://lamerepoulard.com)

After dinner I walked the near-empty streets and then wandered down, through the town's old gates, past the Christmas trees and fairy lights strung across the stone walls, to gaze at Mont St Michel from the causeway.

It looked tall, imposing and quite beautiful, in a stark and severe way, like a castle in a fairy tale;  though I am not convinced this particular one would necessarily have a happy ending.

Perhaps we have to write our own happy endings?

And our own forward-looking New Year beginings?