a tardy post (or two)

ok, ok so these post are getting well retrospective now - what can I say, yesterday I was eating dinner with a french family until late and their internet connection seemed to conk out.

However, I will try and catch up on the posting - starting with this, an account of the day before yesterday (just pretend I wrote it last night and then it all makes sense).


Let me just say though, yesterday I had my best so far - stopping off at another brown sign that turned out to be a real winner and also hanging out in a forest. The best part of all was the cycling - it was really hard, up and down loads of hills for hours but the countryside was stunning and the sun was out and it felt really good. more on those later (will write that up tonight) on though. for now, le mont saint michel.



I arrived at my hostel after around 3 hours of riding in the morning - it was mainly along the coastline through various small french villages and towns. there were no events to speak of apart from my stop off at the little chuch which I mentioned in relation to the brown signs in the previous post.I must admit I am enjoying having little stop offs - it makes the ride much more leisurly and less achy on the legs.
The hostel was very cute - looked like it was possibly made of ginger bread.

 I think there was just one other person staying in the whole place which made it a bit spooky at times but meant i had my own room and bathroom. bargain.

After dropping off my stuff and having a quick shower, I headed off for the biggest tourist attraction that the region seems to have on offer - le mont saint michel. I'm not religious but a big old island with a church built on it and the chance to shop souviners to my heart's content was enough to get me going. Added to this was that the receptionist explained to me there was a cycle route all the way there. No cars = no helmet riding!! No helmet and no panniers = amazing!! I even went for a non-cycle gear outfit:

It was a lovely ride, following the river all the way there. The mont itself was built by some french dude who had a dream a few times in which saint michel told him to build it. It used to be a place for pilgrims to go but now it's mainly a tourist trap, apart from the small religious community who still live in the monestry.

Personllay I thought it was stunning but I didn't particularly enjoy it because it was way too crowded - imagine being in one of those queues at Alton Towers that's about five people thick and seems to go on forever, shuffling at a snail's pace - that's what it's like to wander round the mont - you cannot move freely. Obvioulsy I went to all the museums as I was there, with a view to finding out a bit of history of the place - alas, my French does not extend far enough to understand lessons on building monts for saints so I had to buy a book.

One of the bits I did like was a collection of old astrology books in one of the museums - who knew they loved horoscopes as much as I do and used them to predict if your lovelife would be up to scratch!!!

After wandering round for a few hours I headed back to the hostel via one of those huge hypermarkets - decided it was time to cook my own dinner. Also the hostel had as much "make and drink your own tea" as I could handle - I had a lot of tea and finished off the newspaper.

So a pretty standard day all round - cycling in the morning, tourist stuff in the afternoon, early night.



Just one other thing that was pretty hot on the way back - I passed what looked and sounded like a horse racing track and sure enough, there were horses racing round - but there were no jockeys, just carts with young boys in them:

Thus far, I am loving the trip, really enjoying exercising for several hours a day. Obviously I am already vowing I will keep up this amount of exercise when I get back but not massively convinced that will happen........