The early morning fast catamaran ferry to Cherbourg was cancelled due to 40 mph winds in the English Channel. We ended up on the slow ferry which got us there just too late to pick up our rental car to drive to St. Malo where our motel reservation was. On the 13th try we found a hotel with some rooms available there. The next day we drove to Mont St. Michel and Orleans, and then the following day tasted wine in Beaune, wine capital of the Bourgogne.

Mont St. Michel is a rock connected to France by a causeway which historically would be underwater at high tide. Now the road is always above water.

It's very popular and crowded. There's a charge for using any of the toilets.

There's a pretty abbey up at the top, with a self-guided tour.

The abbey lacks furniture entirely. It really wants a real estate agent to come in and stage it.

Supplies were winched into the abbey using this wheel.

There were several Americans in northern France visiting the various D-Day sites.

Normandy has great seafood -- we had one of these crabs for dinner along with the usual clams and shrimp and the not-so-usual sea snails.

It's possible to eat really well in France for not that much money. This was probably the best restaurant in Orleans, but they had a 34-euro menu which included half a bottle of wine per person. Here's Ray's dessert of raspberries done four different ways.

Beaune is the center of the Burgundy wine regions. One place we went wine tasting featured 14 different wines -- it got pretty confusing after awhile. So we took a break and toured the Hospices de Beaune, founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin as the Hôtel-Dieu, and now a museum. I wonder if the poor people who were cared for in there times of distress thought that their beds would be the goal of tourists in the future? Tourism didn't exist yet, they would have had to model it as some sort of pilgrimage --- in any case I'm sure they figured that Jesus would have returned by now.

The hospital beds.

Bloodletting equipment.

These are really great gooseneck faucets.

The Musée de l'Hôtel Dieu has this polyptych of the Last Judgement painted by Rogier van der Weyden c. 1450. Nicolas Rolin was his patron -- that's how art got made before there were Intellectual Property lawyers.

On to Lyon