Paris to The Loire Valley – June 7/13

We arrived plenty early and there were a few people there before us. Now, one very interesting, unusual, odd and funny thing, was the number of people that would walk up to the office door, see a crowd of about 50 people standing around waiting and even though there were no lights were on inside, they would still try to see if the door was unlocked.

At about 6:30 the office staff arrived, opened the doors and it became a bit crazy as people, jostled to get inside all the while the office staff was trying to get the tours out in a more systematic way. In the end we (being polite Canadians) ended up at the back of the line and last ones on the bus so our seats for the next 4 hrs were facing backwards.

We rode a couple hours and stopped at a highway rest stop where there had to be a dozen other buses all headed for Mont St. Michel, so it was very busy and the toilet line up was legendary; in fact some of the ladies simply headed into the men’s room.

After about another 1 1/2 hrs we arrived at the shuttle area to Mont St. Michel.

Mont St. Michel is an island Abbey that is over 1000 years old, it is fortified and soars above the small village below.

The Abbey is connected to the mainland by a causeway and is surrounded by vast mud flats. Currently there is a lot of work going on to construct a bridge to the Mont and remove the causeway. This is causing a bit of a controversy as everyone has to park about 2 km away and then use shuttle buses.

The shuttle buses are quite unique. Since there is very limited space at the final stop the buses have a driver at each end. So, one driver drives down to the Mont and the other drives it back to the parking lot.

Mont St. Michel was built over a long period of time, some of the preceding pictures show the decades and the progression.

From here we drove to the town of Angers for the night.