From: Rainer Subject: Rainer's Europe Tour 1998 -- part 4 Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1998 16:47:49 EDT Dear Family and Friends , Here is part 4. Cheers, Rainer Sunday, 9/27 We awoke to the sound of the first church bells on Mont St. Michel. The clear starry night had given way to clouds again. It had rained overnight and you could still hear the drops falling from the roof tops. I got dressed before anyone else today and walked (actually, I climbed, since you can't walk on Mont St. Michel -- it's all stairs) around a bit to take some pictures before the masses started showing up. From above I could see that the parking lot already had 3 tour busses unloaded. Several more were coming toward the island down the causeway. This place is quite undescribable. The steepness of the Mont and the height of the stone constructions are, to me, mind boggling. All of the old stone buildings are amazing, but this one, built before the causeway, must have been a agonizing engineering feat. How to get rocks and timbers and tools and whatnot across the mud flats during low tide on a project that must have taken hundreds of years is to me unfathomable. The dedication and planning that went into building a Notre Dame, a Mont St. Michel, or a Chartres is something that no one today can really understand. All of our projects are measured in days, weeks, or months. Really long project may take years. But who do you know that is working on a project he'll never see the end of because it takes generations to complete? When I see the details of just a single rock -- large rock, but still a single one -- and figure how long it would take me to decorate this rock with the stuff at my disposal today from my workshop, I wouldn't know how to do it or how long it would take. And all of this rock construction was done before power tools and hydraulics and electricity was available. That just blows me away. That is what makes looking at old stone buildings so impressive. Mont St. Michel, and La Mere Poulard hotel/restaurant where we stayed are known for omelettes. Monika had a craving for scrambled eggs today (something familiar from home). What does one use to make omelettes? Wouldn't you think that some of those eggs could be turned into scrambled eggs? What is an omelette anyway? Well, here you see the impact of commercialism. Service over most of the Mont was unfriendly and curt. Everyone was too busy to really enjoy their jobs and hence to provide a satisfactory service to their customers. This holds true to the ticket clerk in the Abbey, to the people in the hotel at the bar/restaurant/reception that couldn't provide a bottle of wine to take to the room, to the waiter last night at dinner who foisted a high-priced wine on us, to the waiter/cook this morning who wouldn't think of making scrambled eggs, to the waiter in the creperie we eventually did eat at who looked, after his first three customers, like he was already having a bad day. What a contrast to the people of La Bouille where every contact was a pleasant one, where people seemed to care about your stay, where people explained things you asked about, where people tried to help solve your problems. It's so sad to see the effect commercialism has on this place. It's called "La Merveillieux", the marvel. It has a positive meaning. The marvel, to me, is quite sad rather than wondrous. This is one of places that I really wanted to see. It's awesome. But it's also disappointing. Cheap plastic cameras for kids showing Mont St. Michel when you look through the view finder, swords from King Arthur, personalized cups and bowls, T-shirts with dragons float like the tidal scum around the base of Mont St. Michel. The Mont, however, rises high above this crap and stands, timeless, by itself above the surrounding tidal flats. The tide may rise higher one day and rinse away the detritus that has been accumulated at the base of the Mont. My pictures show both. I hope you can see from them the magnificence that Mont St. Michel held for me and the saddening pall that people bring to this place. We packed up and left by noon. On our way back to the car we couldn't help but look back and take in once more the marvel that this place is. We also saw the lesser black backed gull standing in the sand and flying around. The return to Paris was via a different path, taking us through Rennes and Le Mans. The traffic was nonexistent this morning. The rain had given way to sun and it was very beautiful in the Normandy countryside. The little villages with empty streets on an early Sunday afternoon reminded me of war movies sets -- the narrow streets, the stone farm houses. We got lost driving into Rennes. We never did find the signs that took you around it. A very nice lady in a car next to us at a stop light told us to head toward Cesson. That worked fine, and we found our way out of town. Another curious thing about French traffic signs, there'll be one or two main names indicated at the traffic circles. There will then also be a sign that says "Autre directions", other directions. Some times we even found a sign that read "Toutes directions", all directions. That's how we ended up in Rennes. Our direction never appeared on a sign so we always followed the "other directions" arrow. Once we hit the freeway (watch out for the peage signs, you need to pay toll) we drove a lot faster. Speed limit is 130, but we were probably the only ones to drive that. Traffic picked up after Le Mans. We stopped at a rest area (Aire du some-place-name) and bought a some cookies and cafe. If you like coffee, you'll like France. However, they never serve you a second tasse without charging you, and mostly the coffee isn't as hot as I'd like it to be. We stopped at a place only a few kilometers off the freeway, something du Bernard. It was billed as the West's own Venice with houses along canals supported on stilts. We found a quaint little village but no signs of canals or stilts. We did spot the wood pigeon for the first of what would be many times. After a 5F pain du chocolat from le Boulanger we had cleared the driving haze from our heads and headed down the road toward Paris. In an attempt to do mid-vacation correctional maneuvers, we had revised our plans to visit all the places that we'd picked out while still at home when we drew out the trip on the map. This was the feedback effect from the drive leaving Paris. However, when we were just a few 100 meters from the Chartres exit, I turned to Vera and asked if she was sure she didn't want to stop and see the cathedral. We quick checked the map and decided to take the exit. Chartres, the cathedral, is quite impressive. Notre Dame, however, still ranks higher on my scale of impressive buildings. We toyed with the idea of getting a hotel here and then driving into Paris early in the morning to catch the train to Holland. But, quickly changed our minds and headed back on the freeway to where we didn't exactly know. It started to drizzle again. Then to rain. It was getting darker. Then we came upon the last toll booth. This must be the mother of all toll booths. Two freeways come together here and all 12 lanes all of sudden open up in a huge funnel to accommodate 40 booths! It's an amazing spectacle to see all of the cars and trucks and busses and motorcycles driving criss-cross to get into the shortest line. What's just as amazing, after you've paid, is the rechanneling of all this traffic from wide lanes into 4 lanes going in one direction. Then we hit the traffic jam. Lots of people left Paris for the weekend, and they all came back the same moment we did. We were at a stand still on the freeway and much further away from where we wanted to be the next morning. The clock was ticking away as we crawled along for miles. As a knee jerk reaction I pulled off one exit from which I could see a large Holiday Inn. We ended up driving through a shopping center parking lot and parking structure, up the wrong way of a one-way street, just to get to the entrance to the hotel. They had a room, spacious compared to what we've been staying in. They had a pool. They had a modem connection. They had a minibar. A Pizza Pino restaurant (the French equivalent to our Chevy's) was next to the hotel. We had escaped the traffic and enjoyed the rest of the evening. And so ended Sunday. We even remembered to get the AOL access number for The Hague before we signed off. This was the first time were able to access email from the hotel!