Ruins are Beautiful (part 2 of 2 for today)

(I saved my pictures into smaller files and was finally able to get them to upload. So I think I'm good to go even with this unreliable Wi-Fi in Albert!). :-)

After leaving Mont St. Michel, we headed on a five hour drive to Albert, France. We wanted to break up the drive, so we stopped at more abbey ruins along the way. This time it was Jumieges Abbey. I'm sure the pictures will probably look very similar to the ones from yesterday's ruins, but Jumeiges was so much bigger and better! It was absolutely fantastic! When it was a working abbey its church was called Notre Dame (like so many others), and it had multiple monastic buildings spread around the property. Most of those buildings are gone, and now the abbey ruins sit in the middle of a sprawling green park that sits right alongside the main road in the town of Jumieges. The road probably used to be part of the main pilgrimage road from Rouen to Mont St. Michel because there were many abbeys along the way. The abbey church is so big, we could see it rising above the town from several miles across the river Seine.

The building where we bought our tickets used to be the gatehouse to the abbey, and it is completely beautiful in its own right. From the gatehouse, we stepped out into the park and towering above us were the ruins of the church. Truly awesome! Listen, I can totally appreciate and respect what other people do for fun - camping, skydiving, shopping, etc - but my "drug of choice" is traveling to see historical sites any day of the week. Give me something hundreds of years old with a complicated and textured past and I am in heaven! This fit the bill perfectly!

 

 

There isn't really a lot to say about the pics because you can't really tell what any of the ruins were (except the church, of course). So I'll just let you enjoy the view...

 

 

 

 

 

When we finally had our fill of exploring every nook and cranny of the ruins, we hopped in the car and headed off for the other 2.5 hours of our journey to Albert. Albert is in the region of The Somme, so you'll be hearing all about WWI for the next few days. I can't wait!

 

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