Day 4 — Mont-Saint-Michel, the abbey, and lunch in the village

Today we were in Cherbourg and I had one goal: get to Mont-Saint-Michel. We jumped straight off MSC Virtuosa and onto the coach excursion. The trip is about two and a half hours from port — longer than I usually like for a port day, but for this place it was worth it.

When the bus stops you can use the toilets in the car park and then get the shuttle to the mount. The coach dropped us at the base of the causeway and we walked the rest. Mont-Saint-Michel rises out of the flat Normandy coast like someone placed it there deliberately. The closer you get, the more ridiculous the scale becomes. It is a village, a fortress, and a cathedral stacked on top of each other on a rock in the middle of a bay.

The climb up through the narrow medieval streets is part of the experience. Shops, restaurants, steep stone staircases, and tourists everywhere — but you do not really notice the crowds once you get past the halfway point. The abbey itself is at the very top and it is genuinely spectacular. The views across the bay are enormous. You can see for miles in every direction and the tide was out, which means the flat sand stretches all the way to the horizon. It gives the whole place an even more isolated feel.

We spent a good hour walking around the abbey and the upper walls. The architecture is incredible — layers of building on top of building, centuries of construction packed into one structure. It is the kind of place where you keep stopping to look up because there is always something else above you.

We got all the food from a stall in the village at the bottom of the abbey. I had a jambon and emmental on a crusty baguette — straightforward and fresh. We also got a proper doughnut, the real French kind, sugar-dusted and still slightly warm, and a flûette hot dog — essentially a long hot dog in a flûte-style baguette. We sat outside on a bench with a direct view of the abbey rising above us. Blue sky, warm sun, and one of the most famous landmarks in France right there. It does not get much better than that.

Back on the coach by late afternoon and back to the ship in time for dinner. Legs are tired from all the stairs but it was a genuinely great day. Cherbourg itself is a small port and there is not a huge amount to do right by the ship — but if you use it as a gateway to Mont-Saint-Michel, it absolutely delivers.

Tomorrow we are in Zeebrugge, which means a day in Bruges. Canals, beer, chocolate, and cobbled streets. After the scale of today, something quieter might be exactly what I need.