Beachcombing and St. Malo

I couldn’t believe this was called work. By now, I knew I had lucked out big time with the family that had chosen me to help them. I was their first WWOOFer ever and they were my first WWOOF hosts. While they were audibly worried that they’d work me too hard after hearing reports of poor drifting kids subjected to 12 hours hard labor each day on Spanish farms, I was silently worried I wasn’t working enough and vowed to do whatever I could to compensate for my trip that was slowly becoming a cultural excursion week.

Getting up, Catherine, Michel, Claude, and François, and I made our way to St. Malo for the sole reason that I’d never been there and needed to see it. Feeling a little guilty, but also secretly excited about my Tour de Bretagne, we happily scuttled westward in the family’s anti-GMO van, picnic lunch and all.

Our one pit stop was at Michel’s parents’ house, situated in a one-lane village, comfortably sidled up next to an Atlantic beach guarding masses of mussels and oysters. While François ran off to photograph birds and the rising tide with his tripod, the rest of us headed for the muddy bay, which unashamedly squelched with each bare footstep, making me giggle every time. Armed with violently flapping plastic bags, our mission was to collect as much salicorne, a green plant that sprouts in the bay, the sea water giving it a salty taste, as we possibly could. When low tide hits, it’s time to pick.

Salicorne can be used with garlic, parsley, and butter to accompany fish, poultry, and red meat. When it's soaked in vinegar, salicorne is a great substitute for pickles used with cold meats, fish, and raclette. Catherine sells the popular plant to campers and market-goers. It remains a very popular sale for her as I assume it's hard to find in stores.

That night, Catherine and I stuffed glass jars full of the crop. I got this one to take home.

While the family got straight to work, grabbing at the stalks like they were in a competition to see who could procure the most disappearing currency, I stood like a motionless fool awed by the jaw-dropping silhouette of Mont St. Michel in the far distance. Apparently cultural excursion week had become infectious making my work ethic even harder to find.

This vast, and I mean vast, windswept beach had been the childhood playground of Catherine and Michel’s children. The postcard perfect balcony from the grandparents’ house looked directly out onto the beach, a blinding turquoise band of water filling the window. Lungs inflated with sea air carried in by assertive winds, I didn’t know how life could get any better.

After comparing my pickings to the rest of the family, it was obvious that I hadn’t been as greedy, or more likely, not as efficient. Whatever the case, we eventually washed our mud caked feet in buckets of water supplied by grandma, while her toy-sized dog Zazie ran ladders for entertainment in the grass. Fueled by the juice boxes and the pre-packaged cakes that grandparents can always be counted on to have, we set off for our final destination, St. Malo.

As stunning as St. Malo is, a fortified city planted on a sandy beach, it’s a tourist trap, almost guaranteeing shoulder-to-shoulder contact with strangers inside the ramparts during the summer. When we arrived, it was nothing of the sort. It was early evening, the sun was a giant orange peach sinking slowly toward the horizon, and we’d just splashed about in the warm water for a bit, something that never fails to give me a natural high.

Waves on a St. Malo beach. The posts are there to break the momentum of the waves so they don't damage houses nearby.

On a lovely act of decisiveness by Catherine, we ate our picnic dinner right on a concrete dock behind a line of parked cars and a massive ship tied to land by a rope the size of a human thigh. Spotted with seagull droppings and stained with oil, it was certainly not the most picturesque setting, but we laughed ourselves to tears as tourists walked by and gave us strange looks for eating our dinner in what was really a seaside parking lot. Later, we made up for it by stopping at a gourmet ice cream shop that had a flavor available in saffron.

Rampart walls hug the city and act as sightseeing loop. Here, one can easily imagine how the fortifications blocked both strong sea winds and English attack. We ended our night in a circle. And undoubtedly slept well.