Last-Minute Trip to Mont Saint-Michel

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Friday evening, a few friends and I decided to plan a very last minute trip to Mont Saint-Michel; no booked trains or hostels...we were just going to see what happened.

We all took the RER into the Montparnasse train staion in Paris and managed to find a train from Paris to Rennes. When we arrived to Rennes, we had a couple hours to kill before a shuttle took us over to Pontorson, a small village close to Mont Saint-Michel. We walked around Rennes...it wasn't very picturesque. We found a creepy antique store and a very modern-looking museum about Brittany. We stopped for some paninis and caught the bus to Pontorson.

Brittany Museum
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Upon our arrival, we were overjoyed with the amount of hotels we saw and figured it be quite easy to get a room. We leisurely "shopped" for hotels...eliminating choices that were too expensive for us. However, we soon found out that hotels in small towns are usually booked in advance...and our "shopping" soon turned into desperate searching. As the sun got lower, we started to hate the phrase "c'est completé" (no vacancy). At the last hotel we tried, a very nice employee there helped us out tremendously. She booked a hotel for us in Avaranches, a nearby town, and even got us a taxi to take us there.

Birttany Museum
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We ended up staying at the Hotel Altos which was a nice, but very odd modern-european hotel. We were all starving from all the adventuring we did so we walked to "downtown" Avaranches and got some pizza. When we got back to the hotel, we were still starving. So, we took about 50 pieces of candy from the bowl in the lobby :)

Sunday...we FINALLY made it to Mont Saint-Michel! It was stunning. There is a lot of history behind the place. It was originally a church constructed by the Bishop of Avaranches in the ninth century and was later used as a fortress for the Hundred Years' War. In the 11th century, an Abbey was constructed on top of the mountain which became a popular site for pilgrammage. Because of the pilgrammage, a small mountain village prospered below the abbey. Today, the Abbey has been restored with a group of practicing monks. The site is a wonderful mix of domestic, militaristic, and religious architecture ranging from the eighth century to the eighteenth century.

Sunset on a church in Pontorson
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We first made our way up to the abbey where we attended a mass. The mass was an amazing experience. The chanting sounded beautiful inside the cathedral. The entire service was in French, so i didn't really know what was being said...but it was not that hard to follow. After the service, we took a self-guided tour around the abbey and the crypts below. We made our way back down to the mountain village where we decided to have a nice meal for once! We were all very sick of baguettes, pizza, and paninis. We had a three course meal which included liver, salad, roast, and créme brulée. Since we were in the cidre country, we tried some of their cidre beer as well. The meal was delicious; I ate every crumb :) Afterwords, we walked along the ramparts and then down the path to get a wide view of the mountain.

Our eerie modern hotel room
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In the end, we ended up spending a little more than we wanted to because of the last-minute planning...and we learned quite a lot too. But overall, it was still a fun adventure!