Day 6 - Friday - Abbaye de La Lucerne

A nice morning, and we drove to La Lucerne d'Outremer, with the tandem on the roof.  We left the car and rode down to Genets, on the coast and with very nice views of Mont St Michel in the haze.  Mont St Michel was surprisingly close, and indeed the pilgrims' route takes them across the sands to the Mont.  Presumably this is the quickest way to heaven in more than one sense!.  From Genets we rode up the coast in the direction of Granville.  Along the way there were several viewpoints from which Mont St Michel could be spotted, all bar one very quite with the exception being one that was heaving with people. 

ventually we stopped for moules & frites after climbing out of St Jean de Thomas.  We turned inland through a confused set of one-way streets at Jolouville and returned via the ruined  Abbaie de La Lucerne.

This abbey is being very heavily rebuilt from post-Revolutionary damage when, among other insults, it was converted into a cotton mill.  It's not clear how much is original and how much period, but the renovations are being done very impressively (and have been ongoing for half a century).  As with the abbey at Hambye, it lay in a wooded valley (indeed at one point an extra chunk of land was gifted to the abbey to prevent the locals singing ribald songs and watching the monks in action) so riding away involved considerable climbing.  When we returned to the car, an old bloke buttonholed us and showed us some old photos and drawings of the war, and the liberation of La Lucerne d'Outremer.

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