Reynolds drives an ugly, oversize Volkswagon bus through the French countryside, headed toward Mont-Saint-Michel with his wife Dorothy, niece Linda, and children Trip and Alison. They pass a road sign for Pontorson, a town where he and his wife had stopped on this same pilgrimage eighteen years earlier. Back then the town looked like a nineteenth-century illustration – plain country women, animals walking about the market, flowers and bicycles everywhere. They were the only guests at the hotel and the chef, waitress and chambermaid seemed overjoyed at their presence. They had stayed two days longer than intended in this paradise. Passing through now the village has turned into a town, the hotel unrecognizable.

Reynolds has booked the same hotel in Mont-Saint-Michel for his family on this trip as the last, but nothing is the same. The shops are bigger, the hotel bigger and more modern, the parking lot massive, the crowds of tourists overwhelming. The waiter and maître d’hôtel offer terrible service, and the tours of the abbey are hurried. Reynolds remembers what their taxi driver said in Paris – Paris isn’t Paris anymore. Why, he muses, do things only ever seem to get worse? Has there ever been a time when change wasn’t downhill? He is ready to leave the next day, but first the family goes looking for a series of glorious hidden gardens him and his wife stumbled upon the last time they visited. As they leave, unsuccessful, Reynolds realizes they must have been plowed over to make room for the expanded hotel, parking lots, and shops. There’s no feeling left here, he’s convinced, no joy in service, no untouched beauty, just a mechanical money-making downhill spiral.