Moissac and Brittany.

We spent a couple of days in Moissac before we handed “Winifred” back to France Fluviale. On the afternoon of our arrival we watched the preparations for a funeral at the Abbaye St Pierre, with 200 or so locals including the Gendarme in full dress uniform and the local cops. The Abbaye dates from 1130 and has a striking tympanum at the entrance. It also has a famous cloister but we never did get to see this.

Another day we followed a walking path from the back of the Abbaye up a hill to an old convent and lookout point with a statue of the Virgin and a great view over the valley of the Tarn and the canal. A little below Moissac the Tarn merges with the Garonne. We almost got lost on this walk but eventually came out at the right spot near the station. The Moissac tourist information office near St Pierre provided a good Internet connection and we were able to bring the Blog up to date.

Eventually on Friday morning, 1 June, we said goodbye to “Winifred” and took the train: first to Argen, then via Bordeaux to Nantes and finally to Rennes. This was a long but interesting trip covering a wide range of geographic regions. At Rennes we stayed at a Kyriad hotel near the station, clean and comfortable with good Internet access via a WiFi access point provided by Orange.

From Rennes we visited St Malo by train the next day. This was a great day trip. St Malo was the centre of the Corsairs, pirates and privateers who for centuries menaced shipping in the English Channel and further afield. It was 80% destroyed during WW2, by the Germans or by the allies, depending on who is telling the story. Lots of tourists, souvenir shops, cafes, museums etc. We walked the ramparts and visited the Fort National which is only accessible at low tide. A large number of ferries service the Channel Islands and the UK from St Malo, with long link-spans to cope with the very large tides. There are also large basins connected to the sea by a lock to service the yachts, fishing boats and cargo vessels.

From Rennes we traveled on Sunday to Mont St Michel, taking a bus from Rennes directly to the Mont itself, traveling along the digue (dyke) at the end. Our hotel, the Mere Poulard, was very close to the city gate so it was easy to get our bags as far as reception where we left them until check-in time and went for lunch and a walk on the ramparts. The tide was so far out the sea was not visible at all, even from the elevation of the high ramparts, and the sand seemed to stretch to the distant headland. Back at the hotel we found that the bags had been moved to the 2^nd floor but we had to get them to the 5^th floor up very narrow stairs. The room was very nice with great views over the digue and the surrounding wetlands. After moving in we continued our exploration of the ramparts, alleys, gardens and belvederes which surround the great abbey itself. We watched the tourists taking guided walks on the sand and mud and a guide demonstrating the effect of the quicksand. We felt we had plenty of experience slopping about in estuaries so we kept our feet dry. Then from the ramparts we watched the tide come in, slowly covering the distant sand banks and then rapidly moving up the channels and over the mud at the foot of the walls. Birds came to feed in the shallows and eels were visible. Back at the hotel we ate sparingly at Mother Poulard’s restaurant where the prices were eye-watering and finished off with a Calvados in the lounge bar. The restaurant and bar are decorated with autographs and endorsements from various famous people who have stayed there in the past, interesting but in the end rather self-serving.

The next morning we took the first tour of the abbey with excellent “audio-guides”. The buildings are truly amazing in scale and complexity, the result of a series of structural failures and re-building over the centuries. We just had time after that to check out of the hotel before catching one of the few buses back to Portorson where we had lunch at a small café with normal prices and waited for several hours for the second train of the day (at 5.50pm) to Caen in Normandy.