It was supposed to be a very simple plan: train from Paris to Rennes at 2 pm, bus from Rennes to Mont St-Michel at 4:40 pm, check-in at 6ish, dinner at around 7, wander off to see the village at around 9 pm, take spectacular photos of the mount lit up at night around 10 - 11 or so, then back to the hotel to sleep the sleep of the just.
Something Robert Burns said springs to mind all of a sudden...
Getting to and on the train was fine, despite the usual last-minute dash to leave the apartment. I am so very glad I bought my tickets well in advance because a) the Paris school holiday and b) a little volcano in Iceland have made for commuter chaos. The train station was packed with people. It was like Versailles. With baggage.
About 40 minutes into the ride, I realized I had left my passport in my bureau drawer back at the apartment. Oh dear. Hopefully it wouldn't be an issue.
About an hour into the train ride, we slowed to a stop and an announcement was made: "We're very sorry for the delay, but we suspect that somebody is trying to commit suicide up ahead and we are being held back." Imagine someone at VIA saying that! I wasn't seriously concerned, because there was a 30-minute buffer between the train's arrival and the bus's departure. However, we slowed down again. And again. All in all, we were 50 minutes late when we pulled into Rennes. A cheerful announcement (this time saying only that there were people near the tracks) said something about there was time to make all connections, but the attentive reader playing the home version will have realized that my bus had left 20 minutes before. No matter. I was pretty sure there would be another bus.
There wasn't. When I got to the bus station (right next door to the train station), the nice lady at the counter said that the 4:40 bus was the last one. I guess I must have had my "What am I going to do now?" face on as I tried to remember the French for "Is there another way to get to Mont St-Michel?" because the nice lady asked if I absolutely needed to get there. Since that was rather the point of the whole trip, she told me I could take a bus to Pontorson, which was maybe six or seven kilometres from MSM. After that, she was sure there were shuttles, or I could take a taxi. I had just missed a bus to Pontorson (of course) but the next one left in an hour.
So at 6 pm, I found myself on a bus for Pontorson. The buses have curtains (to shield from the sun, of course, but it makes them seem so much more elegant than the typical Greyhound). It was an uneventful ride, although jerks are jerks in any country; some youth decided to entertain us by playing bad French and English hiphop for most of the journey. It was fun watching the bus navigate the narrow village roads and play chicken with oncoming traffic (the bus always won).
The bus I was on was what we used to call the Milk Run, because it took every twist and turn and passed through every small village between Rennes and Pontorson. And you know what? One small town in Brittany is pretty much like another. But I thought: "I'm having an adventure. How fun."
We got to Pontorson, where the bus driver told me there was a bus to MSM whose stop was right around the corner. Checking the schedule, I saw that I'd missed the bus by 10 minutes. Of course. It would have been a near thing anyway, since the two buses should have arrived at the exact same time. And the next bus wouldn't arrive until 9:30 pm. It was then by then 7:45, and it had stopped being fun.
I didn't want to hang around in a little village for an hour and a half, and what was more, my hotel closed the reception desk at 10 pm. I considered walking, but I didn't know which way MSM was, and I was worried that it would take me a lot longer than 2 hours to get there (hey, I was tired and starting to get hungry). My cell phone was on the fritz, of course. Fortunately, because it was my brother's birthday, I had brought my phone card. There was a sign with taxi numbers and a call box. The nice lady on the other end of a very staticky line told me a taxi would come in twenty minutes. When I told her I couldn't hear her because of the bad line, she said it in English, which actually made it harder to understand. I answered her in French, which amused her, I think.
The taxi came. It got me to the hotel in just under a quarter of an hour. I probably could have walked.
The hotel was pretty much what you'd expect for a motel, although the bathroom was really quite nice. There was an anxious three quarters of an hour when I thought I would go hungry due some confusion over the hotel locking the door at 10 pm and my not knowing my room key would open it. It was probably the only time I would have given much to see a MacDo!
I'll talk about MSM in another post. I will just say this: my first view of it as it rose from the fog was pretty awe-inspiring. Remember that fog, though.
This brings me to today. Right now, even. During my wait in Rennes yesterday, I had looked at the bus schedules and realized I would be seven ways to screwed if I missed the bus from MSM, or if it was late getting in to Rennes. The original plan had been to spend the morning at the abbey and the early afternoon in the village, catching the 2 pm bus to Rennes, which would get me there 15 mintues before my 4:05 train to Paris, but now I wasn't so sure I wanted to take the chance. As interesting as a blog entry about how I dealt with the SNCF during a strike after I missed my train would no doubt be, I really didn't feel like taking one for the blogosphere. I decided to take the 11 am bus and hang out in Rennes for three hours. Which is why I'm sitting here getting sunburned at a café across from the train station.
I hope the journey home won't be quite as eventful.
I probably just jinxed it.
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