A Gift from the Sky: My Night Alone in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel

I do not usually write about myself. I write about the places I love, the people I drive, the history I have spent my life learning. But this time the story is mine, and I want to tell it the way it happened, without dressing it up.

On the 4th of June, I gave myself a small escape. Nothing planned, nothing arranged for anyone else. Just me, my campervan, and the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.

Why I Went

I live in Brittany. People think you have to travel far to find something sacred, but I have everything I need a short drive from home. This is a magical land, an old land, a land that holds something you can feel before you can explain it.

In the middle of the high season, when the days are long and the bay is busy, I sometimes slip away on my own to breathe and to meditate. It is how I stay whole. This time I wanted to do something I had never done before: sleep alone in the van, by myself, with no one knowing exactly where I was. For me that was new. A little frightening, honestly. And then, once the light went down over the bay and the mont turned gold and then grey, completely peaceful.

I slept better than I had in months.

The paths across the bay, wildflowers and grasses, the Mont waiting at the end of them

The Morning I Did Not Expect

The next day was the 5th of June. I was in no hurry. I was simply wandering the bay the way you do when you have nowhere to be, on my way to a farm I love, the kind of place where they grill salt-marsh lamb that is honestly out of this world.

And then they came. Parachutists, dropping out of the sky over the bay, one after another, canopies opening against the morning clouds. I had no idea this was coming. They were training, I understood later, rehearsing for the ceremonies of the 6th of June, the anniversary of the landings, the very next day.

I stopped where I stood, completely still. The air was mild, barely any wind, just a few clouds drifting over the bay and giving it that bewitching charm it always seems to keep for itself. I could not move.

Parachutists coming down over the bay on the morning of the 5th of June, training for the D-Day commemorations, with the Mont watching over them

And it did not even stop there. At lunch, because the farm sits right beneath the flight path, I ate with the military planes passing low over my head, crossing the bay before they released the next parachutists into the sky. Watching them from the table, fork in hand, was pure magic. I am not exaggerating, I promise you.

One of the military aircraft crossing the bay above me, seen from my table, right under the flight path

What It Meant to Me

I am not going to pretend this was an ordinary coincidence, because it did not feel like one.

I felt it as a gift. A gift from the sky. From Saint Michael, the archangel who has watched over this bay for more than a thousand years. And from Colin.

Colin was my best friend. My love. He was a true connoisseur, deeply passionate about the history of both world wars, but above all the Second World War. He did not recite history, he turned it into something living. He taught me to read the ground, to understand the war, not as dates in a book but as something human, something that still aches.

We met because of it. He was Irish and I am Breton, two Celtic peoples who recognise each other, and out of that bond we made a plan: to write a book together about the Second World War in Brittany. Because Brittany is full of the traces of that war, and it mattered, it played a real part in the story of the liberation, and yet so few people ever speak of it. That book was ours.

And I will say this plainly, because it is true and because anyone honest would say it with me. Among the hundred or so guides who work the D-Day beaches of Normandy, every guide with ten years or more on that sand would place Colin in the top three. For me, he was simply the best of them all. He is the one who taught me everything I know about those beaches.

We never got to write our book together. I am writing it now, alone, for him. I am saying it out loud here, in front of you, because saying it makes the promise real, and heavier, and I want it to be both. The clients who know me have heard me talk about it a hundred times. Now you have too. It will be finished.

Since he left, what I feel has only grown stronger, not softer. And on that morning, watching those parachutes open over the bay, on the eve of the 6th of June, the date that meant more to him than any other, I knew. This was Colin saying hello. This was him telling me he was still here, still close, still teaching me to look up.

Canopies drifting down over the bay, with the Mont on the horizon, the morning of the 5th of June

I came to the bay to find a little peace, and the sky handed me the one person I miss the most.

My Way of Saying Thank You

This is also why I do what I do, and I want to be honest about it.

When I walk people across the D-Day beaches of Normandy, I am not only guiding. I am saying thank you. Thank you to those soldiers, so many of them barely more than boys, who crossed an ocean and gave everything in a fight that was not even on their own soil. And thank you to the people of the shadows, the ones we do not speak of nearly enough, the Breton resistance, the men and women of this land who fought in silence and paid for it. This is my way of paying tribute to all of them.

It is also why Brittany matters more than most travellers imagine. So many of my American guests stay in Saint-Malo because of the story in “All the Light We Cannot See”, and they have no idea that some of the most formidable fortifications of the entire Atlantic Wall stood right there, at Saint-Malo, and not only in Normandy. They were here. And whoever takes the time to organise it can still see extraordinary things, the 39-45 Memorial built into the old German fortress, or a captured German flag covered in the signatures of the American soldiers who liberated the town. That, my friend, is something else. But it has to be arranged.

The German U-boat base at Lorient is the same story. More and more people write to me asking to see it, and every time it moves me that they care. These places are not on the usual postcard. They are where the real history lives, the history Colin taught me to feel.

Because here is the truth I carry every single day. I am here, free, living this life on this land, because of them. Because young men I never met crossed an ocean to fight for a country that was not even their own. And now, all these years later, I get to guide their descendants across the very ground where it happened. I cannot tell you how proud that makes me. Thank you, boys. Thank you, America. And thank you, too, to Canada, to Britain, to all the Commonwealth nations we do not name nearly often enough.

So I make a promise here, in Colin’s name. I will keep searching, and I will keep writing, even the smallest stories, the forgotten ones, just to bring those memories back to life. The bodies are gone. The souls are not. They live on, and as long as we keep telling their stories, they always will.

No Plan Is the Best Plan

I want to tell you something about how I travel now, because I think it changes what I can do for you.

This little escape was the first of many. From now on I am going to give myself these adventures, no itinerary, no schedule, no plan, just my campervan and wherever the weather and the light decide to send me. No plan is the best plan. It is how the bay handed me those parachutes. You cannot schedule a morning like that. You can only be there for it.

But here is the part that matters for you. I am not doing this only for myself. As a local guide and a professional driver, I go ahead. I scout my own land, in every season, in every kind of weather, so that when you ask me what to see and when to come, I am not reading it off a website. I have slept there. I have watched the tide come in at dawn and the storms roll over the ramparts. I know which morning is worth getting up for.

And no, I am not really trying to sell you anything. I genuinely do not mind. What I want is to help you make the right choice, the right place, the right season, the right light, for the trip that is yours. Some days I am in the campervan with a flask of coffee. Other days I feel like a princess and I simply book a beautiful hotel, which in Brittany is never hard to do. Both are the good life. I just want you to have the version that fits you.

I Am Telling You This As I Am

I usually keep this part of myself private. My clients see the guide, the driver, the woman who knows the tides and the back roads and the best table in the village. They do not always see the rest.

But I wanted, this once, to show myself as I am. A woman from Brittany who still talks to the sky. Who grieves, and who finds her friend again in the strangest, most beautiful moments. Who believes that this land gives back to those who sit quietly enough to receive it.

If you have ever lost someone who shaped the way you see the world, you will understand exactly what I felt that morning. And if you have not, I hope one day a bay, or a sky, or a place that loved you back gives you the same gift it gave me.

For Colin

This one is for you, Colin.

For every beach you walked me across. For every story you made me feel instead of just hear. For the patience you had with me when I did not yet understand what the ground was trying to say.

You were the best of guides and the best of friends, and you are still teaching me. I felt you in the bay that morning, as clearly as I have ever felt anything. Thank you for the parachutes. Thank you for the sky.

Until we walk the beaches again.

Belinda