“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.”
― Bill Vaughn
Sites/Topics covered in this post:
- Mount Saint Michel
Go-Date: Day 151, Saturday, June 22
Lesson Learned: Normandy is beautiful. After 3 weeks in Paris it was really nice to get out into the country. Rural France reminds me a lot of Virginia. Its really pretty. Beautiful rollers (undulating countryside), tree-lined lanes, bountiful farmland, horses, vineyards, winding roads, cute villages (Normandy beats Virginia hands down in this category). We especially loved the fields of lavender and wheat bumped up next to each other. This place is a haven for honey bees.
While driving around, don’t be shocked when you stop for breakfast or coffee if the folks sitting next to you are already drinking wine at 9 AM in the morning. Its just the French thing to do. If they are drinking beer, those are probably German tourists. I’m pissed….Ellen made me take off the beret and send the wine back at the café. I keep telling her crepes are like pancakes, and wine goes well with crepes. It’s one thing to sit in a sidewalk café in Paris as the cars, scooters, and Vespas zip by you belching out exhaust, but out here, sit on a square across the street from a 500-year old cathedral, looking out across fields of lavender really eases your soul. In addition, every 50 kilometers there is a chateau comparable to the Hurst Castle. The only bad thing is, as Steve Martin once said “Boy, those French: they have a different word for everything!”
D-Day Remembered
The Mémorial de Caen is a museum and war memorial in Caen, Normandy, commemorating World War II and the Battle for Caen. More generally, the museum is dedicated to the history of the twentieth century, mainly focused on the fragility of peace. Its intention is “pay a tribute to the martyred city of the liberation” but also to tell “what was the terrible story of the 20th century in a spirit of reconciliation”.
It’s a moving monument, starting with the full-sized Hawker Typhoon hanging from the ceiling right over the ticket desk (shades of the Air & Space Museum in DC). The building and grounds are located in the northern suburbs of the city of Caen on the site of an old German blockhouse bunker that was a command center leading up to the Normandy invasion. There weren’t any objects that were really photo-worthy, but the images of the evil things that happened are really moving. We spend several hours here, we could have done more, but we ran out of time as the museum closed on us. If you are feeling a little homesick, they also have a Norman Rockwell exhibit here as well. Did I mention that the people in Normandy, as a rule, really like Americans?
Mont Saint Michel: I love this place like a fat kid loves cake!
You’ve heard about it. You’ve read about it. You’ve seen it on TV or in movies. But, you just can’t get the full impact until you see it for yourself. Le Mont-Saint-Michel is an island in Normandy, just south of the Cotentin Peninsula. The island is located about a kilometer off the coast, at the mouth of the Couesnon River. It sort of just springs up on you out of the wheat fields as you drive up on it, though as you get closer you can see it’s a damn island. As of 2015, the island has a population of 50, who have got to be a few (3) priests, an electrician, 1 librarian, 4 plumbers, 6 maintenance workers, 21 accountants, 12 saloon keepers, and 3 hookers from Paris that decided it was easier working in the cafés on their feet than the city on their backs.
The island has been a strategic fortifications since ancient times and since the 8th century AD has been a monastery. The structural composition of the town exemplifies the feudal society that constructed it: on top, God, the abbey and monastery; below, the great halls; then stores and housing; and at the bottom, outside the walls, houses for fishermen, farmers and a few courtisans.
The commune’s position—made it accessible at low tide to the many pilgrims to its abbey, but defensible as an incoming tide stranded, drove off, or drowned would-be invaders. I’ll bet it was something to see when you had to slosh over a soggy path through the tidal basin at low tide to get to the island. Today, there’s an all-weather roadway where buses continually pass through disgorging tourists, 40 at a time. There’s also a few horse-drawn carriages hauling fat sight seers from Berlin and Des Moines. The island remained unconquered during the Hundred Years’ War. Louis XI got it back from England and realized that if the island could keep people out, it sure could keep people in, turned it into a prison. The abbey was used regularly as a prison during the Ancien Régime.
The Mont was connected to the mainland in prehistoric times. As sea levels rose, erosion reshaped the coastal landscape, and the outcrops of granite on the island resisted the wear and tear of the ocean better than the surrounding rocks. It’s one of France’s most recognizable landmarks, visited by more than 3 million people each year, Mont Saint-Michel and its bay are on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The original site was founded by an Irish hermit, who got tired of potatoes and cabbage and moved to France to grow grapes, who gathered a following from the local community. Mont-Saint-Michel was used in the sixth and seventh centuries as an Armorican (Armorica: in ancient times was the name of the part of Gaul between the River Seine and the Loire River that includes the Brittany Peninsula), stronghold of Gallo-Romans until it was ransacked by the Franks, thus ending the last vestiges of Rome in 460. Which always makes me wonder why if you want to get rid of the Romans, why didn’t they want to get rid of the Roman Catholics? I was just wondering.
Before the Catholics took over the island in the 8th century, the island was called Mont Tombe. According to a legend, the archangel Michael appeared in 708 to Aubert of Avranches, the bishop of Avranches, and instructed him to build a church on the rocky islet. I’ve had visions of blue penguins that commanded me to buy a Corvette, but I’ve yet to convince the bank to finance this venture on my testimony.
Unable to defend his kingdom against the assaults of the Vikings, the king of the Franks agreed to grant the Cotentin peninsula including Mont Saint-Michel to the Bretons (Breton is most closely related to Cornish area of England) in the Treaty of Compiègne in 867. This marked the beginning of a brief period of Breton possession of the Mont.
In 933 when William I Longsword annexed the Cotentin Peninsula from the disinterested Duchy of Brittany. This made the mount definitively part of Normandy at the time of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Is it no wonder that the French and English dislike each other like the Greeks and Turks? In 1067 the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel gave its support to William the Conqueror in his claim to the throne of England. This he rewarded with properties and grounds on the English side of the Channel, including a small island off the southwestern coast of Cornwall which was modelled after the Mount and became a Norman priory named St Michael’s Mount of Penzance (which we are visiting in early July).
History can be so interesting. Bottom line is, come see this place. Its out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a pretty nowhere and it really is an amazing place to see.