May 19, 2023
The crowds at Mont Saint Michel
Today was supposed to be a day of exploring the town and abbey of Mont Saint Michel. I visited Mont Saint-Michel in 2010. When I last visited we drove into the car park built next to the mont, walked around the town and visited the abbey all without a line to be seen.
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I should have guessed things were different when the GPS kept rerouting us onto different roads to save time as we approached the area. As we weaved our way through the small towns leading up to the mont we ran smack into miles of stopped traffic. I told Kathy it was worth persevering as it was worth seeing. By the time we made it into the car park we were wishing we had parked back in the town and got Dorthy out. At least then we would have gotten a nice ride in.
13 years has made a big difference to the Mont. You now park in one of 13 mega car parks. There is a shuttle bus that will take you the 2 miles from the car park to the mont. Near the car park is a camp ground, hotel and a small group of food and souvenir places, none of which we saw last time I was here. The car park had a constant stream of cars arriving and thousands of people walking to get on the shuttle bus. Kathy and I elected to walk to the mont not wanting to get in amongst the crowds just yet.
The bridge was packed with people walking towards the mont. We could see people standing on the road that winds up to the abbey but I thought it was just people looking over the parapets. How wrong I was, when we got through the first gate and around the corner the path was packed with people 5 or 6 across stopped at the bottom of the walk way. The path leading to the abbey is about a mile long and as far as we could see the mass of humanity was not moving at all.
All theses people were too much for us. We turned around and headed back to the car park and called it a nice walk to the seaside.
The lesson I take away from this is we need to check out the other big tourist attractions we want to visit and try and prebook a time to get in and to arrive very early in the morning.
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