lady says, with commendable sanguinity, ‘we don’t hear much about it here. I suppose it will be okay.’
They’re more anxious about us getting run over by what they call ‘milk floats’ – the tiny, whining voiturettes you can drive in France without a licence, making them, they claim, popular with those banned for drink driving. ‘They’re lethal, those things,’ she tells me as we leave. ‘Watch your back.’
This slightly sinister warning, as well as a vast, bloated dead cow I spot out of the corner of my eye as I roll past a farmyard on the outskirts of town, make me feel quite nervous and when I lose Matt on a long climb shortly afterwards, I become positively paranoid. Just as I’m about to turn around to see if he’s been flattened by a drunkard on a milk float, he comes round the corner looking a bit pink, and asks, very politely, how many more mountains we have to climb before the big one. I have to confess I have no idea, but there’s certainly no mistaking the thing when we finally reach it: Avranches is a very pretty town, if you don’t mind heights.
The road in winds up round the lower suburbs like a snake, though this gradient is at least preferable to the shortcuts Google Maps keeps trying to divert me onto, all of which appear near vertical. When I finally make it to our budget hotel, I’m puce, and there’s no sign of Matt. ‘Do you have a bar?’ I ask Madame, sweating onto her registration forms. She looks genuinely apologetic as she shakes her head, so I head upstairs for a cold shower instead.
Somewhat revived, I look out of the window to check Eddy is still in the courtyard three stories below, and see Matt sitting on the terrace sipping a large glass of orange juice and looking rather pink. ‘She just offered it to me,’ he shouts up in response to my aggrieved question. ‘I think she went to get it from her own kitchen. I must have looked like I was having a heart attack.’
In the circumstances, it seems wise to head no further than the café across the square lest we lose even an inch of gradient before dinner. I happily put away yet more potatoey pizza, and Matt polishes off not only a sausage version, but a big bowl of ‘pasta General Patton’, named after the leader of the US liberating forces in 1944, which might also explain, now I come to think of it, the large tank parked up on the roundabout opposite our table. With a fair quantity of carb to walk off, we stroll through the town to try to find that famous view of Mont-Saint-Michel before the sun goes down.
As it sinks lower in the sky, almost bouncing against the horizon, we force our protesting legs into a final dash through the botanic gardens, tripping over bits of ancient stonework in our hurry, and just manage to catch a glimpse of the celebrity island across the bay before it disappears into the darkness. The sea is silvery under an apricot sky, and from here, on the edge of Normandy, we can see the Breton coast stretching away westwards in the sunset.
Give or take the odd farmhouse, it’s a landscape that doesn’t look much like it’s changed in centuries. ‘Nice and flat anyway,’ says Matt with some satisfaction as we turn for home.
STAGE 3
Omelette Soufflée
The omelette is an ancient dish, known and loved long before Mont-Saint-Michel was even a twinkle in a monkish eye, but the island has been famous for ‘the exquisite lightness and beauty’ of its version for over a century. These are not the creamy baveuse omelettes of classical French cookery, but puffy soufflés, whipped until they rear from the pan like sea foam, and finished over a wood fire with copious amounts of Norman butter.
One of the benefits of staying at the top of a huge hill, of course, becomes evident the next morning, when we speed out of town like racing demons, Matt shooting past too fast for me to see the smile on his face. We’ve already learnt one valuable lesson today: many things in France, including, incredibly, boulangeries that even open on Christmas morning, are closed on Mondays (see here, Pause-Café – French Opening Hours). How I’ve never realised this before is unclear, but after wandering disconsolately around the shuttered streets for half an hour, we finally spot a man with a baguette under his arm and sprint to catch up. My reward for accosting a complete stranger in a foreign language before I’ve had so much as a coffee: a pretty decent, very flaky 8/10 croissant. Coffee, however, remains a distant dream.
After crossing the handsome stone bridge at Pontaubault where we finally wave goodbye to the Cotentin Peninsula, the road swings right and climbs briefly out of town before dropping abruptly down into the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. Suddenly we find ourselves pedalling into a sea mist; the only sounds the plaintive bleating of sheep somewhere to our left and, briefly, the hullabaloo of a convoy of Americans on hire bikes too busy complaining about their ‘sore asses’ to greet us as they pass. As the sound of their protests recedes into the gloom, and I shrug on my jacket for the first time, things begin to feel a little bit creepy.
On the plus side, when the Mont does finally show itself to us, it seems gratifyingly close – until we notice the cycle route sign: 17km. ‘Hang on a minute,’ Matt calls to me. ‘Didn’t that last road say it was only 9km?’ I check my phone, still wobbling slightly every time I take my hands from the bars of my poor, overladen steed. ‘Yeah … I think possibly the cycle one takes the scenic route.’ There’s a short but loaded silence from behind, then, ‘How scenic?’
He has a point: for all the Dutch caravans and British estate cars, these are hardly superhighways winding us through the polders, and I’ve made our lunch reservation on the Mont stupidly early for reasons I can’t now remember, so we’re easily persuaded off the bike route and on to the main road, which takes us past an enormous fragrant biscuiterie churning out delicious buttery galettes. Sadly, there’s no time to stop and investigate the factory gift shop; I content myself with breathing in deeply instead.
Several kilometres from the island itself the road comes to an abrupt end in north-west France’s largest car park. Once upon a time you could drive right up to the foot of the rock at low tide, and chance your vehicle being washed into the great beyond if you lingered too long over the postcards (indeed, as we discover later, there’s still some very entertaining footage of exactly this online). These days, you have to park on the mainland and take a shuttle bus across the sands: visitors are allowed to cycle the 800-metre causeway before 10 a.m., but as you can’t leave your bike at the other end it’s a largely pointless exercise unless you’re desperate to add another couple of kilometres to the day’s total, and we’re too late anyway, so we ditch them in the parking area, lugging our bags with us as the lockers are out of action ‘due to high security level’.
Though the bike racks may be quiet, the bus is busy, and we cram on behind a great muscular man with a shih tzu in a rucksack, who tuts every time anyone inadvertently brushes against the dog, which, thanks to the density of humanity on board, is fairly often. I stack my mysteriously weighty panniers on my foot, hold on and pray that the bus moves swiftly, which of course it doesn’t, stopping almost immediately at the row of rapacious gift shops a few hundred metres from the visitor centre, where more people attempt to squash in. It’s amazing, I think, how quickly even a regular passenger on the Northern Line can get used to the glorious space and solitude of the open road.
The shuttle doesn’t take us all the whole way to the Mont; it stops some distance from it, allowing everyone to rush over to the railings for snaps with the most famous island in France, a fortress that repelled every invasion attempt during the Hundred Years War with England. How things change; outside Paris, Mont-Saint-Michel is the most-visited site in the country.
