From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 3 Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:47:43 EDT Dear Family and Friends, Here's the next installment. Cheers, Rainer Saturday, 9/26/98 We woke up to the church bell (right across the one-lane street) at 0800. That was actually quite nice since it meant that we all slept much better than the night before. Monika, of course, has had no problems sleeping. We also awoke to rain. The clouds that we saw yesterday actually materialized into precipitation. It was raining quit hard, too. Le petit dejuner today was on the second floor dining room of the hotel overlooking la Seine. A table for 3 was already set. Remember that this hotel has only 7 rooms. It was a morning when Monika was up for eggs, like we had at the Cafe Notre Dame in Paris yesterday. However, that was not to be had here. After breakfast we walked through town. Believe it or not, the same store that sold the ferry post cards also sold the latest Anime comics from Japan. They are a hit here, too, and issues were available that are not to be found in the U.S. Of course, they are in French, but it sort of makes up for not getting eggs for breakfast. Sort of. We finished packing, paid the bill, and left Mush Town. Instead of driving the Normandy country roads like we thought we would but found out yesterday was quite tedious, we decided to change our original plans and drive straight (almost, see later) to Mont St. Michel. The A13 is just a couple of kilometers from city center. There was little traffic. Since it was raining, it took me more than a reflex action to turn on the windshield wipers. All of the cars I've ever driven don't have a wiper on the rear window. It's actually pretty neat. We zipped along nicely and figured when we hit Caen (still don't know how to pronounce this -- "kah-enn", "cay-n", "sah-enn", "seen" -- for lunch. For who knows what reason, we stopped in front of a brasserie named Diabolo. Monika, whose been subsisting on a diet of pizza (French style) and croissants, was not in a mood to try anything else (how many 13-year olds are?), and decided that even the drink she ordered (Orangina) was disgusting. So she was going to not eat -- even though she's the one that was hungry, not having liked the croissant she had an opportunity to eat for breakfast. I had the house special (Jon Batcheller said that you can't ever go wrong ordering that -- if you like it), Vera had what was effectively a sub sandwich on half a baguette served on a saucer. Monika finally agreed to have another pizza, but this one sucked. We left the Diabolo and headed down the road. Le guy du head of the Diabolo spoke broken English, and must have the same dictionary I bought from Shakespear's second cousin, because his directions involving "right" and "straight ahead" were quite confusing, and wrong. If you've never driven in France, you should know that they don't like to make stop signs or traffic signals. They like to make traffic circles. The traffic circle are quite efficient, especially if you miss a turn. You can go around another time and try again. What's also odd in France is that road signs builders only make signs that point left or right. These signs typically have the name of the place inside a large rectangle with a pointed end that shows the direction you should go. When you're used to having arrows go upward to indicate straight ahead it's difficult to understand signs with arrows "sort of pointing left, but in a straight ahead sort of way". Needless to say, I circumnavigated more traffic circles than I should have had I known where I was going. (Note: this is really being written 2am Sunday morning -- the date on the entry is all wrong. This is going to be another one those short nights when sleeping doesn't work. I haven't even gotten to Mont St. Michel yet. I guess that will have to wait until tomorrow since regardless of being sleepy, there's a long drive tomorrow. We're going back to Paris -- don't know where -- but I'm jumping into the future when I haven't even finished about the past yet). The saying "it pays to advertise" hit home when the sign to McDonald's in Granville caused us to take a short detour because we felt sorry for Monika after the Diabolo event. A burger, fries, shake, and a spare order of chicken nuggets made for a very happy camper again. We thought the road from Granville along the coast might be pretty to take -- but we got stuck in Centerville again (Centre Ville signs exist in every town, regardless of their names). I took a couple of pictures while (not) driving through the narrow, single lane streets. So we headed back to the mainer highway to Avranches, gateway to Mont St. Michel. Along the way we passed a sign "La Butte est Gros". Didn't know if that was a place name or what. Should've taken a picture for the Oregonian's travel section. Mont St. Michel started appearing behind some hills and trees every once in a while. At one point there was a Picque Nique (no kidding) area which offered a very nice view of the rock. There's a huge parking lot at the base of Mont St. Michel. Lots of tour busses, lots of tourists. It's a much more commercialized place that I expected. But the structure is still very impressive. Our hotel, La Mere Poulard, was quite near the base of the Mont. That was welcome. We had planned to carry only our day packs to the hotel, leaving the bulk of the luggage in the car below. One thought that entered my mind as we left the car was the tide. You could see in the parking lot where waves had swept up the crud from the sea and left the floating debris on the asphalt. Then we started exploring. We explored until almost 21:00. What a fascinating place. Monika stayed in the room taking a bath and playing Starcraft while Vera and I went to dinner. We were going to bring a crepe back for her. The restaurant, a Creperie, was in a hurry to get everyone out. The guy behind the crepe cookers looked at his watch as we walked in. There were no crepes this evening. Dang. Don't ever let the waiter pick the wine for you. He's spending your money when he does that, and his objectives and yours are definitely not the same. The dinner was quite good, but way too expensive. C'est la vie. Monika finished off the chicken and some crackers. There was an event taking place in the Abbey tonight until 2300. It was to combine the mystery of music and silence and lights throughout the structure. We decided to go. Where did all those people come from? Hundreds and hundreds of them! I don't remember much of the shuffling itself. We did get to parts of the Abbey that perhaps we'll get to see with only 20 or 30 folks if we visit during the day. There was artsy sculpture and lighting and funny music (noise, actually). On the way back to the room we stopped at a couple of overlooks and looked at the constellations. The clouds had disappeared and I pointed out my favorites. We could even see the Andromeda galaxy from here. We downloaded the 76 pictures for the day and did the slide show thing. Monika and Vera crashed, and I updated this journal and finished the wine although not in that order.