Normandy Again - Mont Saint Michel and Saint Malo

[This is the second post in recent times for Normandy.  Click here to see the earlier post, with great photos of white cliffs painted by Monet.]

For Jennifer's mother's visit, we spent two nights at a cottage in northern Normandy, so we could visit Saint Malo, Omaha Beach American Cemetery, and Mont Saint Michel.  Saint Malo has a nice Old Town, with cobblestone streets and fortified stone walls with paths on top looking out over the water.  I'm not sure about the name of that body of water - probably the English Channel.  By the way, "old" Jersey, i.e., Jersey, is a British island off the coast there.  I had no idea New Jersey was named after an island just off the coast of France!  Anyway, here are a few photos taken from the top of the fortified wall.

I love how there are several layers of dark and light in this scene.  The reflection of the sun in the sea and the lighthouse on a distant island are also interesting.

Hello seagull!  I was annoyed at the two women in the lower part of the photo for ruining my perfect reflection by walking in that pool.  How inconsiderate!

The photos above were taken after 10 PM.  It was near summer solstice, so the sun stays up incredibly late here.

The next day, we visited Mont Saint Michel, which is sort of an island city.  For about two weeks every month, the mud flats surrounding the little hill become a shallow sea during high tide.  The photograph below shows how the area looks from the walls of Mont Saint Michel at other times.  Notice the people in the lower right corner.  You can supposedly get sucked into quicksand out there, but there were a lot of people wandering around in the mud when we visited.  None of them sucked down to hell as far as I know.  Maybe it's more dangerous when it's really wet, soon after the tide recedes.

Later, after finishing dinner around 9:30 PM, I dragged Jennifer and her mom out of the house to watch the sunset.  I drove us to a spot I had scouted out earlier in the day, with a good view of the "island city."  Sitting in the car on a dirt road between two muddy fields, we watched the sky for a whole hour.  We weren't disappointed.

Before I shrank this to fit on your PC screen, it was more than 22000 pixels wide; enough to fill 11 high-definition televisions placed side-by-side.  Wish I could see it displayed like that!

A crescent sun ...

Good night sweet city.