Mont St Michael and Leaving the UK

Day 11 - 4th June

It was another fairly early start for us as we needed to get down to Mount St. Michael and then back up the coast to Plymouth to take the ferry to Roscoff in France.

We parked up just across from Mount St. Michael and took a 20min walk over to the island while the tide was out.

Mum had made a very senior comment the night before when she said that she would rather take the boat and we could walk. I told her she couldn’t which she got a little upset about, until I explained that she couldn’t take the boat because there was no water as the tide was out!

Mum walking to St Michaels Mount as the boats were not running at low tide.

We arrived about 30mins before opening time so spent that time wandering around the gardens. Little did we know there was a truckload of people heading over and they were currently standing in the queue to buy tickets for when the castle and gardens opened at 10:30am.

Claire and I heading over to St Michaels Mount.

As we went back to the ticket office, we saw the line and got a little bit worried as we were stretched for time as it was and didn’t see how we would be able to fit it all in if we had to wait for a ticket.

Mum took care of this in her usual manner, pulling an attendant to the side an explaining that we had actually been there long before the everyone else, were pushed for time and had not bought tickets earlier because we thought they were sold somewhere else. Mum convinced the lady and we avoided a queue of about 100m long!

After a quick tour of the grounds and leaving Mum to walk around the castle we headed back down the hill and sold our tickets for half the cost to some older English people at the end of the line – taking advantage of the queue they were in. We rushed back to the van and waited for Mum to return.

Mum standing in front of where the fisherman saw Arch Angel Michael.

We were a little bit worried at how quickly she could get back as the decent was fairly uneven and there was now a stampede of people coming over to the Mount.

Mum made it back on time and informed us later that her secret to getting back through the crowd was to just look down at what her feet were doing and let everyone go around her.  She did give way to small children and those slower than her however.

Finally we all loaded up into the van and trucked it back up the coast to Plymouth in record time. Luckily we were heading the other way compared to the bank holiday traffic, as there were queues outside of Penzance for miles long that would have definitely got in our way of a timely departure to France.

I now sit here on the ferry to Roscoff in peace and quiet as Claire and I have managed to ship Mum off to see the Marigold Hotel in the onboard cinema– hopefully she’ll get some ideas of moving to India!

We rolled off to Ferry into Roscoff, France, excited by the new unfamiliar French advertising signs that greeted us as we looked for a place to camp for the night.  We came upon one campground that looked more like ‘wet and wild’ theme park, but were turned away as we had not booked in advance.  We sneakily filled up with water and pushed on.  We settled for the night in a small town called Carantec in a very random car park of about 6 spaces, which was along side a round about.

Our wild camping site in a random car park of Carantec France.