July 6, 2017

July 6, 2017

We had dinner last night at our hotel in La Roque Gageac. It was outstanding. Finally we have started to get the French meals we have expected. After dinner we walked the very small town. It is another town on the Cutest Villages of France list. It sits at the foot of the cliff-lined Dordogne River. At one end the locals are having a Petanque (bocce ball) tourney.
 

This morning we are up early driving to the town of Les Eyzies about thirty minutes away. This town is where Cro-Magnon man remains were first found and has become a center for Prehistoric Man. It is also renown for the abundance of nearby caves with Early Man artwork. Unfortunately, visiting the caves has been severely restricted because of environmental damage. One of the best still open is Grotto of Font-de-Gaume. We are here early to see if we can get the limited “walk-up” slots. We are 14th and 15th in line. Two hours later when the ticket office opens up, we really luck out and get the last two tickets for the first tour and it is in English, a rarity.

Font-de-Gaume has loads of paintings of bison and a few horses. They are well drawn with shades of brown, black, and red. Often the figures have the eyes and horns scratched into the rock. And surprisingly some of the figures are almost 3-D because of the texture of the base rock. Surprisingly very few human figures are represented in any of the Cro-Magnon cave art sites. Our guide for the tour was excellent. He reminded me of a professor. He explained that the cave floor is now lower because of archeological excavation for artifacts.

Afterwards we stayed in town for lunch and visited the Prehistory Welcome Center and the National Museum of Prehistory. Neither was worth the time or money. While they have lots of stone age artifacts, the level of detail is beyond my interest. Plus English was rare. Despite now being part of the polyglot European Union, the French are stubborn about language and go out of their way not to translate or accommodate non-French tourism. Another reason their economy is in the dumps. The best part of the museum for me was right at the end when I saw some sculpted oxen in bas-relief retrieved from a local cave.

Finished with our Prehistoric Man lesson, we drove to the main Dordogne town of Sarlat-la-Caneda. We walked several times around the Medieval Center. The town has many sumptuous old buildings. We stopped at a cafe and got the standard French teeny-tiny coffee so I could rest my legs and Aimee could people-watch. Street entertainers are common in France. Appropriately here was one posing as a Neanderthal Cave Man.