So. Last weekend (really?) I went on a horseback riding trip to Mont St. Michel, which is somewhere on the border between Normandy and Brittany (disputed, although the few people who live on the island itself tend to be loyal to Normandy). The organization that ran the trip was called RandoCheval (randonnée means hike, trip, excursion; cheval means horse), and they do riding trips all over the world, America included, actually. Anyway, I went with Kat (from Bowdoin) and Andrea (from Amherst), who are both on my program; Carol, an English woman who has lived in France for a long time; and Cecile, Fanny, and Aurore (I think? I was never really clear on her name), French. Also one guide from RandoCheval, Jean-Louis, and another man named Michel whose job it was, apparently, to ferry our bags around in his car and open gates for us occasionally.
So we spent the first day riding around the bay of Mont St. Michel, for about eight hours. There were sheep everywhere. Sheep! There is a special breed of sheep in the area, named le mouton pré-salé, and they can only live in this area because the local herbs they eat give the meat a special flavor. The kicker is this: the herbs are sort of salty, because the area is routinely flooded by ocean water; and pré-salé means pre-salted.
Pre-salted sheep. I hope those sheep don't speak French so they don't know what they're being called.
These are photos of the first day. We collapsed in a field (sheep included) for lunch. That's Andrea in pink.
Michel brushing a horse butt.
Mont St. Michel in the background, and pre-salted sheep.
Horses.
My horse. Her name was Idélia, which seems to me a pretty fancy-shmancy name for a crabby little horse. We got along pretty well by the end of the second day, but she was kind of a pain. She had exactly two speeds: slooooooooow walk, fast trot. My knees were killing me (a combination of them being horrendous to begin with, and me not having ridden for a couple of years), and to get her to walk at a pace exceeding that of a, well, lazy bum, I had to be constantly working; and my knees hurt too bad for me to be doing that. So we let everybody get ahead of us, then we'd trot to catch up, let everybody get ahead, trot to catch up ... The only time she was actually with the group for any amount of time was when we cantered, which only happened a couple of times, because the ground in and around the bay is soaking wet and unstable. We did canter once, and it was great; this is where the gravel road comes in. We took off, I mean, we were flying. It was fabulous. It was then that Idélia decided she wanted to be in front, and now; the only time all weekend where I actually told her to slow down instead of speed up. All the horses were ex-racehorses that had been saved from a glue-factory retirement, which probably explains why the canter turned into a race. It was pretty great, though.
Carnage in the field at lunch.
Second day. The first day, we walked around the bay; the second, we went on through it. First through these fields, approaching Mont St. Michel; then we had lunch at the island, and explored it for about an hour, and rode back to our starting point through the bay again, but this time sand.
That's Andrea again right in front of me.
I like this picture. It's tilted. I was on horseback. Give me a break. You can see our spacing problem.
Mont St. Michel. We rode right up to it through the parking lot, which was entertaining, not least of all for the people who dropped their jaws to stare at us.
Parked. Fanny and Cecile debate what to leave behind as we go up to the town.
These are all of Mont St. Michel and looking down at the bay. I asked if those people on the sand had crossed the bay on foot; Fanny said, Yes, we call them fools.
Horses parked in the parking lot. They attracted a lot of attention and accepted it graciously as their due. I was surprised how many people just walked right up to them and started petting them, with no idea of how friendly they were or if they bit, or asking permission. The horses were very good about it; until one of them got edgy and snapped at Carol, when we started warning people off.
Mont St. Michel from the sandy part of the bay.
From here on I have no more pictures, because it started to rain. We were crossing the bay behind another guide, a man who knew all the ins and outs of the bay, where the quicksand was (!) and so on. It went pretty well for the first hour or so, and then suddenly the temperature dropped and a storm started to come in. I was the only person who had bothered to bring a raincoat, since the weather had been so nice all weekend. The wind was starting to blow and the sky got dark, and we were out in the middle of the bay; I looked at Andrea, and she said, I hope it doesn't start to storm.
Cue lightning. The horses perked up a little bit, to say the least; they didn't want to hold still anymore, they wanted to get home. We were approaching a river running through the middle of the bay. The guide warned us: okay, get in a V formation, don't follow too close but don't get too far apart, be aware that the current is fast, don't follow in anybody's tracks because it's unstable, be careful. He went through the river and crossed back to check out the bottom of it, and then we followed him in. It had just started to rain and the whole setup was so ominous we were practically laughing.
Halfway across the river, the guide's horse stumbled into a trough. He smacked it and it leaped out, but Fanny couldn't get out of the way in time. Her horse fell in, totally fell down, on its side in the water; Fanny shoved her way off it and was far enough away from it that it missed her while flailing and got back up and trotted out of the river. Fanny was soaked, but she was fine. It could have gone so horrendously wrong -- she could have had a broken leg, she could have been trapped under it -- but she got really lucky. They caught the horse on the other bank. The rest of our horses were thoroughly freaked out by this, and while we waited for Fanny to get back on, we kept circling and circling. Then it started pouring.
The rest of the ride back (about another forty minutes) was so miserable, Andrea and I actually laughed. There was nothing else to be done; it was so over the top. It was pouring, lightning and thunder, the horses were freaked, we were trotting fast and we were all so tired we could barely post. My boots filled up with water within the first five minutes, and it was splashing out the top. I was the only person with a raincoat, and the water was coming down my neck anyway; it was raining so hard it actually hurt. The horses knew we were almost back, and they wanted to get there. So we let them. It was a nearly surreal forty minutes.
Kat has an aftermath photo somewhere. We are all completely soaked and laughing in a semi-demented sort of way. I wish I had a copy, but oh well. We had a four-hour train ride after we got back, and the entire time, we were completely loopy. But it was awesome. Definitely one of the coolest and one of the most painful things I've ever done.
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