There is a Starbucks inside the walls of the Forbidden City. Nothing is sacred. So I shouldnt be surprised, in the least, to the make the gauntlet hike to the top of Mont St Michel and be bombarded with ticky tacky tourist trap shops all the way.

Mont St Michel is a medieval masterpiece, and if you didnt know that, you’d just have to visit one of the dozen shops offering to sell you armor, swords and chess pieces of the day. Heck, they’ll even sell you a Knights of the Round Table rotating centrepiece, or action figures from Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings.

According to Rick Steves, we shouldnt be too disappointed by the tackiness of the Grande Rue. He warns in his book, France 2008, the Mont is “home to a single, grotesquely touristy street.”

In other words, it’s just like Gastown. A beautiful, classic, heritage site taken over by the fine purveyors of tee shirts, tea towels and anything with an “I was there” marking.

Okay, that’s fine and dandy but E3,70 for a can of Coke? That’s about C$6. That’s about ridiculous.

Jen and I survived the run, and made it to the abby at the top. 10 minutes late. Sure, it’s open til 6, but the last group is let in at 5. We saw a back door from the gift shop with people trailing in from the tour, so we thought we’d do it in reverse. We made it about halfway through, when a woman made some comment to Jen.

She doesnt speak french, I heard her make english comments to someone else along the lines of “go ahead, I’m coming back.” I thought it was a tour, Jen thought it was something else. So we continued along for another few minutes until we reached a locked door. Uh-oh.

The church is closing, that woman was sweeping out the dregs, and we just passed her. We hustled a couple of dark, stone chambers ahead and found .. another locked door.

We were trapped. In a stone abby, that just 2 centuries ago was used as a prison. Sure, Michael, it may not be Sona or Fox River, but let’s see you get out of this one. With a baby. And no food. And no phone.

Thankfully we didnt need to scream, the woman was just a few steps ahead and heard us fiddling with the locked door. She opened it, scolded us, and we hustled our way back to the beret shops, where we belonged.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under france, travel.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.