I had a really early morning start to the day...I got up at 5:30 to get ready for a 7:00 arrival only to find out the ship arrived an hour early into Cherbourg...so no sail in photos, just me losing a bit of sleep…. For the foreseeable future, it appears that we are going to be joined in the next few ports by the Nieuw Statendam…. beautiful ship! A very exciting day for me...we are now in Europe and I have always wanted to visit Mont Saint-Michel... Ann, Cathy, Herman the Executive Housekeeper and I took the ships tour to the Mount Saint-Michel. The 2.5-hour drive from Cherbourg to Mont Saint-Michel was a very scenic drive through the Normandy region of France. You could have not asked for better weather...sun and blue skies. Mont Saint-Michel is a tiny tidal island and surrounded by its bay where take place receives the highest tides in Europe up to 15 meters variance in level...it is the most popular and visited tourist spot in Normandy. The beauty of this absolutely unique island and the ancient abbey has a rich history spanning more than a thousand years. Mont Saint-Michel is a UNESCO World Heritage medieval village. Mont Saint-Michel is the 2nd most visited tourist site in France. Every year, more than 3 million visitors come to discover Mont Saint-Michel and its 40 people living there, including a small community of 5 monks and 7 nuns returning to settle in 1966 after leaving the place during the French Revolution. The long history of Mont Saint-Michel began in 708, when Bishop Aubert erected a first sanctuary on Mont Tombe in honor of the Archangel Michel. In 966, Benedictine monks settled there on request from the Duke of Normandy, Richard I. In the period from 1791 to 1863, its building was used as a prison. The prison closed in 1863 and in 1874, the abbey was classified as a historical monument, property of the French government. The Romanesque abbey church was founded over a set of crypts where the rock comes to an apex, and the first monastery buildings were built up against its north wall. In the 12th century, the Romanesque monastery buildings were extended to the west and south. In the 13th century, a donation by the king of France, Philip Augustus, enabled a start to be made on the Gothic section of the "Merveille": two three-story buildings, crowned by the cloister and the refectory. In the 14th century, the Hundred Years War made it necessary to protect the abbey behind a set of military constructions. With the celebration of the monastery’s 1000th anniversary, in the year 1966 a religious community moved back to the Mont. Herman and I walked 30 minutes from the parking lot to the base of the mount and the ladies waited for the navette/shuttle to the base. We met the guide and started our walk through the narrow streets and the steep path to the abbey. The abbey is the result of visionary architectural design and passionate attention to detail. It was a wonderful day; the weather was perfect and another major place of interest off my bucket list. The first part of the blog (Part 1 of 2) has photos of Cherbourg and the trip between Cherbourg and Mont Saint-Michel. The second part (Part 2 of 2) has photos of our visit to Mont Saint-Michel.
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