France! First stop, Dinard and St Malo

So, after finally getting to the airport outside of Glasgow, we soon landed in France, in a town called Dinard on the north coast.

This is a seaside town, right near a much more touristy (and old) town called St Malo.
We had 2 nights in Dinard before moving to St Malo for a night.

Our first day in Dinard we took pretty easy, just walking around the town, trying to fumble our way through a few very messy words of French and eating fries, crepes and mussels!

The next day we took the short ferry (5-10 mins) to St Malo to check it out. This place is unreal. It started off way way back when some monk set up shop and made himself at home on an island just off the coast, and bit by bit a city was built around it, eventually becoming a walled city with a castle and a number of forts on outlying islands. It was pretty much ruined in the second world war, but has been rebuilt apparently pretty much back to how it was (except of course that half of it is now restaurants and hotels...

Here's a pic of the city itself as seen from the ferry.



I've got plenty more happy snaps from the city but too many to put up here...


Once we moved to St Malo, we took a tour bus out to one of the places we've been looking forward to visiting for months. Mont St Michel. Somehow a big rock was created millions of years ago and someone thought it would be a perfect place for a cathedral - and they were right!

Again, over the years, homes were built around it, as well as a wall, and it became an impregnable fortress withstanding all that was thrown at it. The tides are huge here, and at low tide you can walk out to the outlying islands! Low tide stretches out for miles... However that also means big high tides, and in the old days the high tide would completely surround the whole rock. Nowadays there is a causeway that lets the hordes of buses and cars park right next to it - i've never seen so many people in such a small place - walking up Ye Olde Street towards the cathedral at the top of the hill was a nightmare - but well worth it in the end.
We grabbed an audiotour and worked our way through it - i'm always amazed at how people could build such huge places on such crazy places, nearly a thousand years ago - amazing...