Rocamadour, Saint Cirque, and Pech Merle – Thur, Oct 25th

We set the alarm to get up early, 7:00 -- I know to most people, this doesn’t sound that early but it is pitch black -- the sun doesn’t come up until after 8 am.  We want to be on the road and at Rocamadour by 9 am.  We are, however, thwarted when we get to a bridge about 20 minutes outside of Sarlat and see that the workmen have just closed it for the next 2 days.  Turns out it’s the only bridge for quite a distance and we have to make a small revision to our plans, cutting out a trip to an underground lake. And no, I’m not kidding about this – the wonders of rural France!

We make it Rocamadour, which really is a sight.  We do wimp out and pay for the elevator to take us to the top.  But, we do walk back down…

 

 

From Rocamadour, since we’re no longer going to the lake, we head towards our very viable plan B, lunch.  We’ve largely become French, or at least the version of it we’ve learned from books and from Bill, we plan around our meals.  And we go back to Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, where we went earlier in the trip and where I had the best foie gras of the trip.  It’s called Le Gourmet Quercynois.  I tell our waiter of our loyalty and he smiles.  But, he doesn’t bring me any extra foie gras.

Maxine has an omelet populated with bits of local truffle, the other regional delicacy.  Truffle omlets aren't what they're cracked up to be, but it's qualitatively different than the cepes omlet the dsy before.  (Leaving Sarlat we considered visiting a truffle farm and going “in search of”, but during the off season that was only scheduled for afternoons, so reluctantly we passed).  Here the omelet is earthy and fluffy and tastes of truffles.  Since we have the foie gras as a quality baseline for the level of this restaurant, we eat the omelet in the belief that this is how it’s supposed to be!

After lunch we retrace our steps by 20 minutes drive and get to Pech Merle.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pech_Merle   It’s a cave painting location.  For some reason, France is one of the places that people settled a really long time ago.  And places like this limit themselves to some finite number of guests per day, in this case, 700 people in total. 

We’d been to Les Eyzies over 15 years ago and seen cave paintings done 15,000 years ago.  Pech Merle wasn’t, to us anyway, as well known.  But, it’s better!  They’ve dated the paintings as 25,000 years old.  And they’re more extensive.  The guide tries to explain how the various ‘brush stokes’ represent deer, bison, bear, etc.  It works, sort of.  But, to me the simple fact that people were down here 25,000 years ago and left their mark is sufficient.  I don’t care if it’s art.  I don’t care if they painted fish or what they had for dinner last night, or if it was in some way acknowledgement of their gods.  I am curious what would have motivated people to go to all this trouble.  But, mostly I am appreciative of the fact that they’ve done it.  And I’ve seen it!

It’s now 5 PM and we head home.  Our drive takes us 2 hours and through another major wine city, Cahor.  But we’re too spent to take the time to stop.  We've become suspect of our GPS's analytic skills since it assumes we can actually go the posted speed limits on narrow mountain roads -- often we can't come close.  We get home and have a light dinner (after truffles and foie gras for lunch – of course!).