Saturday, February 23, 2019 was sunny and warm, so Karen and I headed out for a loop around northeastern Brittany. The route we drove was circular, about 300 km, and we did it in a single day, since we skipped climbing up to the abbey at Mont-Saint-Michel. Four visits were enough for us, even though the place is fascinating.
For similar reasons, we didn’t spend much time in Saint-Malo or Cancale this trip. We mainly drove out there to put this article together. If this is your first time in the area, I highly recommend splitting the route into two days. Spend the first night at one of the recommended hotels in Saint-Malo. After the first day, continue the next day to Cancale and Mont-Saint-Michel.
For the budget-conscious who aren’t willing to wisely spend 60 euros a night at our wonderful castle, and who’d rather spend 100 euros a night somewhere else (there, I’ve said my piece), I marked Nantes as the starting point.
So here are the points of interest, roughly marked on the map above:
1. Nantes.
2. For the virtuous among you: our castle, Fort de Roche.
3. Saint Suliac.
4. Saint-Malo.
5. Cancale.
6. Mont-Saint-Michel.
Before we continue, a riddle about French culture
Who am I?
At 17 I joined the French army, but left because it struck me as a waste of time. I traveled through America and was captivated by the Native Americans, about whom I wrote two stories. I married a woman for her considerable fortune, and shortly after, the revolutionary government confiscated it. In revenge, I joined the royalists. When they failed, I fled to England.
The revolutionaries executed my older brother in my place. Scoundrels, couldn’t they have executed my wife instead? With no other choice, I went back to her, but I also took on a mistress. Napoleon respected me, because I wrote in praise of religion. Not that Napoleon was especially religious, but the revolutionaries he replaced had been hostile to the Church, so he was in favor of it.
He appointed me as a diplomat in Rome. As a token of thanks, I wrote an article comparing him to Nero, the mad emperor. In return, Napoleon exiled me, and I dedicated my book “The Martyrs” to him. To spare myself further torment, I wormed my way into government as foreign minister. In my book “Memoirs from Beyond the Grave” I summed up what I’d learned from life’s twists and turns:
When we die, the earth opens its bosom to receive us, grows grass and flowers over our grave, and turns us into the matter from which new life springs.
So, who am I?
(Hint: connected to Saint-Malo.)
Nantes to Saint Suliac
We hit the road.
First leg: Nantes to Saint Suliac.
About 180 kilometers. That’s a lot, but almost all of it on fast highways.
You leave Nantes heading north on the N137. At the entrance to Rennes, you take the bypass, the N136, then exit onto the D137 and continue north until you turn off onto the D117, which brings you straight to Saint Suliac.
Saint Suliac
The village itself doesn’t have anything especially remarkable, in my opinion, even though it’s on the prestigious list of the 160 most beautiful villages in France.
Here’s the full list, for anyone interested.
That said, the promenade along the bay offers some beautiful panoramas. It’s not a unique phenomenon, but it’s an excellent example: a river, in this case the Rance, flows into the sea, and the sea flows back into it and widens it considerably, up to about 2 km wide, turning a village many kilometers from the coast into a sea harbor with excellent protection from storms. There are countless fishing boats, sailboats, and yachts of every size (read: price).
As for a restaurant there, Bistro de la Grève looks good, at least judging by the crowd of diners.
Not only was there no free table at the restaurant, they wouldn’t even let us use the restroom. But there are restrooms further along the promenade, to the south, at the entrance to the parking lot.
Francophile tip: if you want to check out more restaurants, and even get discounts on some menus, I highly recommend clicking this link.
St-Malo
From Saint Suliac we head back the way we came to the N137, which takes us straight to Saint-Malo.
The city is known mainly for its large ferry port. Here’s one of the ferries:
The channel crossing from here to Portsmouth in England takes much longer than the crossing from Calais to Dover, but that’s exactly why the British have taken a liking to this route: it lets them sleep in comfortable cabins while their car swaps stories with trucks whose steering wheel is on the clearly uncivilized side. The big ferries have restaurants, movie theaters, hair salons, manicure and pedicure services, and a few other things I didn’t check out.
Francophile tip: these ferries can also take you to the island of Guernsey, where I lived for almost three years.
Even before you reach the ferry port, you’ll see a replica pirate ship at the entrance to the city:
Indeed, Saint-Malo was one of the home ports of the Breton pirates. Actually, if I said that to one of them, he’d march me straight off the plank into the waves, since the people of Saint-Malo don’t consider themselves Breton, and certainly not French:
Ni français, ni breton, malouin suis (I am not French, not Breton, I am a Malouin)
Interestingly, this Malouin identity carried over into the Spanish name for the Falkland Islands, “Malvinas”, and that’s no coincidence: the first Europeans to arrive there were, of course, people from Saint-Malo.
To be precise, these weren’t actually pirates, but “privateers” (corsairs). A privateer does exactly the same thing, that is, he attacks another ship from his own and steals its cargo, but, much like a lawyer, he does it with a license. In exchange for a license to raid ships (in principle limited to enemy ships, though the privateers’ disciplinary courts weren’t exactly strict about the details), he hands over 10% of the loot to his country’s authorities.
Since I’ve brought up pirates, I won’t let the subject go so easily. There are several theories about where the term comes from. The most common one is that it’s a corruption of the word “private”. That ties into the licenses to attack enemy ships. In other words, a country’s naval power was made up of a regular navy plus “private” warships. Worth noting for any navy commander out there.
Another important point worth clearing up is the eye patch that every self-respecting pirate liked to sport. Did they all really lose an eye in battle? The most original explanation I found is that it had nothing to do with blindness at all, but covered a perfectly healthy eye. Why? So that one eye, the covered one, could keep its pupil wide open. That way, when the pirate went down into the belly of the ship and removed the patch, that eye wouldn’t need time to adjust to the dark. Worth noting for any pilots among us.
The old city of Saint-Malo sits within massive walls, which include several fortified gates:
The entire city of Saint-Malo, including the old quarter within the walls, was destroyed down to its foundations in World War II, after the Allies began advancing from Normandy into the rest of France. By the way, I won’t pass up this chance to mention that the Americans, the British, the Canadians, and even the Free French army had no hesitation about unleashing massive firepower on areas they were about to enter. They did this even though, in most cases, these areas were full of civilians, the very people they had, after all, come to liberate.
In one of my history books I found a quote from Winston Churchill (1874-1965), declaring that he was sick of hearing about “French children killed by British shelling” yet again. In his defense, I’ll note that he had far better lines, the kind that made it into every history book, but those he probably delivered when he wasn’t drunk.
The city was rebuilt precisely, based on old photographs and information from residents who remembered the buildings as they’d been before they turned into piles of rubble.
There’s a large underground parking lot outside the walls. When we got there it was full, so we did what the French do: we waited at the entrance until a spot opened up.
A general note: in some parking lots in France, there’s no way to know when a spot has opened up, since the exit isn’t visible from the entrance. But don’t worry: the gate won’t let you in until another car has left the lot, at which point it happily lets you through. A kind of staggered monogamy, if you will.
From the outside, the old city looks like one giant fortress, but inside it’s full of everyday civilian life. Shops, cafés, museums. It’s worth a wander.
We didn’t wander this time, since hunger was starting to demand its due, and we wanted seafood. There are, of course, plenty of fish restaurants in Saint-Malo, but the recommended spot is Cancale. There, the restaurants sit right on the promenade, overlooking the shore exposed at low tide, and diners can watch their crabs marching in a line from the breeding pools straight to their plate.
By the way, not everyone waits for the crabs to come to them. You can see crowds of locals walking the sand at low tide, gathering crabs and shellfish, as well as fish trapped in tide pools. This activity is known as “fishing in boots”.
(Before we leave Saint-Malo, one more hint for the “Who am I?” riddle. Besides my “connection” to Saint-Malo, there’s also a steak, or more precisely, a way of cutting a fillet, named after me.)
Recommended restaurants in Saint-Malo
If you’ve decided to stop in Saint-Malo for lunch or dinner, I highly recommend checking out my article on recommended restaurants in Saint-Malo and the surrounding area.
Cancale
I marked the route we took, which is the fastest one, since we were in a hurry to get to the crabs. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s driven along the coast whether that route is worth it.
In the main square of Cancale, in front of the church, there’s a fountain statue of two women carrying baskets of oysters:
Cancale sits at the western edge of the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, known for having some of the most dramatic tidal range anywhere, thanks to how shallow the sea is there. A drop in the water level can push the sea back by several kilometers.
We arrived at low tide, and the sight of boats resting on the exposed seabed was impressive.
You can check the tide times for Cancale on this website.
No need to study the charts in detail; the page shows the time of the next low tide and the next high tide right up front. You can also switch to the pages for other places in France.
Food. So much food. There are countless restaurants along the promenade, all of them full, and the parking lots are just as packed.
There are also stands selling oysters, shucked right there on the spot:
That’s nice, but we hadn’t driven all this way on an empty stomach just to eat standing up. Here’s a tip that might work for you too: if everything along the promenade is full, head to the southern end of it. There’s a hotel there called La Mère Champlain.
It’s technically a hotel, but its restaurant is open to anyone off the street who’s hungry.
A half-liter jug of excellent muscat wine costs 5 euros. Santé !!!
I started with a fish soup. There are no words.
At the table next to us, four diners got an Eiffel Tower of seafood:
It looked like more than I could handle, and my natural indulgence occasionally gets hit by a (rare) wave of modesty, so I went with an order of 10 cold langoustines instead:
Langoustines look like giant shrimp. I eat shrimp with no problem at all. What could possibly go wrong with langoustines? Everything, apparently.
The head came off easily enough. But the tail and body were sealed up in armor like a knight of the Templars. I squeezed. I pulled. I scraped. Nothing worked. I moved on to the second one, thinking maybe it would be more brittle, then the third. By the tenth, I hid my shame under a pile of napkins. Once I got home, I realized I wasn’t alone in this: try googling “how to eat langoustines” and you’ll be amazed at how many tips and videos come up.
I couldn’t let it go, so I got up from writing this and drove to Redon, where there’s a seafood stand inside the InterMarché shopping center. Not quite as fresh as in Cancale, but presumably they’re not out to poison their customers.
For 3.5 euros, I bought 10 langoustines:
I boiled water with a pinch of salt and dropped the langoustines in, head first. The instructions say 3 minutes, but since the langoustines were cold, the boil stopped the moment I put them in, so I timed it from when the water came back to a boil. I took them out, put them in a pot of cold water for five minutes, and then straight onto the plate.
The secret, as I learned from the video, is that after removing the head, you gently press on both sides of the shell, with the back facing you, and it releases the body:
Let’s get back to the meal in Cancale.
For dessert, in more ways than one: many restaurants in France serve a dessert called a “café gourmand” among their dessert options. It comes with coffee, of course, but the real draw is the small sample portions of regular desserts. We got a little cup of rice pudding with a berry sauce, a chocolate cookie, a light cookie with strawberry, and a small scoop of lemon sorbet. Excellent, of course.
Leaving Cancale gives you a panoramic view of the town and its surroundings:
Le Mont-St-Michel
From Cancale to Mont-Saint-Michel is about 50 kilometers. If you’re in a hurry, it’s best to cut over to the highway and cover most of the distance there.
This place is considered one of the most beautiful spots in the entire world. Beyond the legendary view, which looks like something out of a painting, what makes it unique is that the hill the abbey stands on turns into an island at high tide, and reconnects to the mainland at low tide. Since the tide times matter a great deal here, I recommend checking them on the tide table found on the official website of the island.
I won’t even try to describe how beautiful this place is. I’ll lean on a much better writer:
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), who visited Mont-Saint-Michel in the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote in his story “The Legend of Mont Saint-Michel” (my own translation):
I saw it for the first time from Cancale, this castle enchanted by the sea, like a gray shadow against a misty sky. I saw it again from Avranches, at sunset. The vast stretch of sand was red, the horizon was red, the entire boundless bay was red. The rocky fortress rising there in the distance, like some strange dwelling, like a palace from a dream, strange and beautiful, stood alone, black against the crimson light of the dying day.
The next morning, at dawn, I walked toward the sands, my eyes fixed on it, an enormous jewel, as large as a mountain and as delicate as lace. The closer I came, the greater my admiration grew. Nothing in the world could be more wonderful or more perfect. I was astonished, as if I had discovered the dwelling place of God. I wandered among halls held up by slender or massive pillars, and raised my eyes in wonder to spires that seemed like arrows shot into the sky, and to a marvelous array of towers, gargoyles, and delicate, exquisite ornaments: fireworks of stone, of lace, of granite. A masterpiece of architecture, colossal and refined.
A word of caution: it’s very tempting to walk out onto the sand exposed at low tide. Crowds of tourists wander far out. And you can go far. The sea retreats about 12 kilometers! But it also comes back, and fast. I never timed it myself, and different sources give different estimates for how fast the tide returns: somewhere between 10 and 18 km/h. That might not sound too bad, but keep in mind that it’s hard to run on sinking sand.
You can get a good look at the place in this video:
This place has inspired many artists. Maybe the most interesting case is M.C. Escher, who was apparently influenced by the view when he created his woodcut “The Castle in the Air,” which in turn seems to have influenced later fantastical works.
A bit of history of Mont-Saint-Michel
In the year 708, the Archangel Michael appeared before the bishop of Avranches, Saint Aubert, and commanded him to build an abbey on the granite rock that had already served as a place of worship. “Build it high, and they will come,” he said. In the years since, the abbey was built up, level upon level, in a mix of architectural styles, mainly Romanesque and Gothic. The island also served as a military fortress, thanks to how easily a small force could defend it against much larger ones. It’s one of the few places in northern France that wasn’t damaged at all during World War II.
The gilded statue of the Archangel Michael stands atop the abbey:
Over the years, various attempts were made to overcome the island’s isolation at high tide. I remember that on my first visit, many years ago, there was a raised causeway you could drive on all the way to the foot of the abbey, even at high tide. It later turned out that the causeway was disrupting the natural balance and causing silt to build up. Not long ago, maybe three or four years back, the causeway was replaced with a bridge on stilts. Now the water flows freely underneath it.
Today, parking is in lots about 2.5 kilometers from the island. A free shuttle service runs continuously, and there are also horse-drawn carriages (for an additional charge of a few euros).
You can also stay at hotels located along the route from the parking lots to the island itself, in which case you can park in their private lots and catch the shuttle right from the hotel. If you choose to leave your car in the public lot, remember to take your ticket with you, since the payment machines are fairly far from the parking area.
Visiting Mont-Saint-Michel
If you’ve decided to visit Mont-Saint-Michel, I highly recommend booking tickets ahead of time to save precious time. Here are a few options:
- Abbey tickets, in case you’re getting there on your own.
- Ticket plus transportation, great if you’re staying in Paris and want to do a day trip to Mont-Saint-Michel.
- Ticket plus transportation plus meal, an excellent, great-value package.
Where to stay in Mont-Saint-Michel
The best time to visit Mont-Saint-Michel is in the morning, before the daily invasion of tourists. But for that, you need to stay on the island itself or close to it. So if you’ve decided to do that, I highly recommend checking out the article Recommended hotels in Mont-Saint-Michel.
Our trip through northeastern Brittany ends here
Did you solve the riddle? Let me know in the comments.
Danny
Want to stay in the castle where Danny lives?
A 50-minute drive from Nantes, there’s an old castle that’s been turned into an indulgent boutique hotel. That’s where Danny lives, and that’s where you can stay too. You can find more information about it in the article Manoir de la Chausée: Stay in a Castle in Brittany.
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