Judging by the list I just copied from my December 26 post, I'm supposed to start this post off by talking about Christmas day. (Oh jeez, this is going to be a test of my memory for details more than anything else.)
Oh, except I don't think I mentioned that Christmas Eve (or maybe it was December 23), Dad and I went out for a drive from Sarlat and visited one of the castles/towns that I had visited with my friends in the fall. Colleen wasn't feeling well, so Mom stayed with her in Sarlat while we went over to Beynac for a few hours.
Remember this one?
I will say that it still feels a bit weird that Christmas and New Year's even happened because it never really felt like the holiday season to me. Yes there were lights in the road and presents and Christmas markets, but since none of it was anything I was used to, it didn't feel very Christmas-y. That's not to say I didn't have a nice holiday season, it just feels strange to think that the holiday season is over when I hardly feel like it even happened.
But Christmas did happen, and here's what we did:
We opened a few presents and ate a picnic-Christmas meal in Mom and Dad's hotel room the morning of Christmas. In the afternoon we decided to go out and see a few towns that were fairly close to Sarlat. We decided on Cahors, because pictures showed us that there was a very cool and very old bridge in the town, and Rocamadour, because pictures showed us that it was awesome.
Here's the thing about Cahors: it does have a very cool, very old bridge. It is also a sad and ugly town. It was a very depressing place - even more depressing when you think that it was Christmas day and it was empty and gray and closed up. Unfortunately the bridge was not quite cool enough to cancel out the ugliness of the town, so it was kind of a bust. But still. Pictures! (But only of the bridge. Didn't take any of the town...)
The bridge was built in the 1300s to keep the British out of Cahors. I don't know how a bridge keeps people out of a city - to me it seems like more of an invitation to march right in - but I'm no defensive bridge-builder, so what do I know?
And despite being built in the 1300s, the bridge was apparently used by cars until fairly recently. Must be pretty structurally sound.
I climbed up some stairs to get up to a higher wall (in the picture above this, the little wall/arch toward the front of the bridge) which were pretty freaky. They were concave from being walked on for 700 years - and also had no hand railings.
So, yes, Cahors wasn't great, but it doesn't really matter cause I did still get cool pictures of the bridge. Luckily our second stop wasn't disappointing.
Get why I said that?
That's Rocamadour. It's an old town and a pilgrimage site built onto a cliff face in a valley. It's been a pilgrimage site for centuries, ever since they found the very well preserved body of Amadour (get it? "Rocamadour" = "roc" "amadour" or "Amadour's rock") in a cave of the cliff, a guy who they decided must have been a holy hermit and therefore worthy of a pilgrimage site. Clearly I'm a little hazy on these details, but basically the important thing is that it's a bunch of really old chapels built on a cliff face.
Old chapels and Colleen looking at old chapels.
It was all very cool and very interesting. And probably much nicer than it is in the summer. In the summer it is apparently swarmed with tourists. Our only company was a bunch of French families who had gone to walk around as a Christmas outing.
Looking up at the chapels and buildings from the "main street" of the town. (I used quotation marks because there is only one street in said town.)
Some skeleton paintings on the side of a church. Creepy!
We liked Rocamadour a lot. It was a very cool place to see and wander around. And as we were leaving, there was someone playing a trumpet across the valley along one of the ridges. We eventually spotted him (it looked like maybe a teenaged boy and a few friends) - but it was very cool to hear Christmas carols wafting across this valley containing a little town and an ancient pilgrimage site.
According to my list from two weeks ago, I am also supposed to mention our terrible GPS system, a British-accented disembodied female voice that Colleen named Bridget. No matter how many times we told Bridget we wanted the "shortest route," she seemed to be determined to take us on the "most scenic" one. Or "shortest route if you mean using only back country roads and no highways." A few of our trips probably had about an extra hour or two added to them because of Bridget. We eventually ditched her and used the iPhone, which seemed to have a much better grasp on what people want when they put in point A and point B in a GPS.
We left Sarlat the day after Christmas to go to Bilbao, Spain. On the way, however, we stopped in a nearby little town called Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (how's that for a back-country French name?) which is home to some Cro-Magnon cave paintings. AKA cave paintings from 17,000 B.C. (I was off when I said they were 40,000 years old. But 19,000 years old is still pretty old.) The oldest Cro-Magnon skeletons were also discovered in Les Eyzies. (As an aside, the Cro-Magnons were the race that trumped the Neanderthals and eventually evolved into, well, us.) There are tons of cave paintings all over this region of France, but the paintings in Les Eyzies, which are in the Font-de-Gaume cave, are the only multicolor paintings that are still accessible to the public. Other multicolor paintings have been replicated in museums in the area, but the real caves are closed to the public. The only other original caves/paintings open to the public are one-color ones. And if caves are ever discovered now, they're immediately closed to the public and only accessible to historians/archaeologists. And they only let 80 people a day in to see the Font-de-Gaume paintings. So, needless to say, we were lucky to see these caves. (Also that it was winter, because you have to make reservations months in advance during tourist season. We just got to walk right up and buy tickets!)
I think that the Font-de-Gaume caves might have been my favorite part of our family trip. The caves themselves were very cool and then the drawings were incredible - mostly because they're just so old and it was so interesting to hear about them. I'd known about the cave paintings in this region since high school French, so it was great to see them in person. I found it incredibly fascinating.
Walking up to the caves and the entrance to the caves themselves. We couldn't take pictures inside or anything, so I'm going to get Google to do that work for me...
Buffalo! And reindeer! We saw lots of buffalo and reindeer and also a wolf. Apparently the cave is also home to tons of pictures of mammoths, a tiger, some other animals (that I don't remember) and even a picture of a Cro-Magnon (which is one of the only pictures like that that has ever been found) but those areas aren't open to the public. Partly because they're really hard to get to, and partly because it's just so hard to preserve everything. But what we saw was super cool.
I still have lots to write about though, so I'll make sure to keep posting this weekend. And, to make sure I don't forget anything, here's a list of what's to come. Sorry, I just really like lists.
1. Bilbao and the Guggenheim
2. A slightly creepy cathedral
3. Versailles (and oh my gosh the crowds)
4. Paris (and oh my gosh the crowds) and New Year's Eve
5. Mark!
6. A city made of bricks
7. A giant fortress cathedral
And more. I'm sure I won't write about all of that in one post, but this will make sure I get back into blogging! And it will keep me occupied and not feeling sad about everyone leaving!
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