One of my favorite sayings is “sometimes even blind pigs find acorns”. I now know how they feel when they find one.
Our overnight location tonight – Rocamadour – was picked purely due to its geographic position. It is a comfortable four hour drive from Creissels and on a line from Creissels and our Dordogne Region destination Sarlat-la-Caneda which I had already picked. I didn’t spend a lot of time looking into the town itself. I expected us to hit town, get a good night’s sleep, and hit the road early. The hotel’s rating was on the low side, which worried me, but it’s location trumped the rating.
It turned out that the town of Rocamadour was the “wow” moment of the trip to date. Our first view of it was a glimpse of what appeared to be a hill town sculpted in relief into the side of a cliff face. As we got closer it turned into a town, and our GPS took us up its winding approach road and through one of its (very) narrow town portals (close-our-car-mirrors narrow a la our earlier experience with Tony and Diane in Cetona). Jan had a worried look on her face and I wasn’t sure what was in store but we trusted our GPS and headed down the two donkey wide road. She (the GPS) stopped us at a three donkey wide spot in the road and said “you are at your destination”. Now what? We spotted the hotel and Jan guided me off the road as far as possible so we could unload the bags and I could carry them up to our third floor room (no elevator, hence the hotel’s rating). Parking at the hotel was not prudent if we wanted an unscathed rental car, so I drove it down to the parking lot in the valley below, then hiked back up to the hotel. By the time I rejoined Jan I felt like I had hiked Mt LeConte again!
The rest of our evening was very nice. We had a nice glass of local red wine at the hotel and then walked about the town looking into store windows (Jan) and exploring interesting nooks and crannies (me). We found a casual brasserie for dinner, and ate at a patio table that overlooked the valley below and the Church of Santa Maria a hundred meters above.
But wait, as TV pitchman Billy Mays used to say in his infomercials, there is more!! This morning on our way to Sarlat la Caneda we visited the Grotte des Merveilles, a cave close to Rocamadour which contains a number of cave drawings made by cro-magnon residents of the area 25,000 years ago. Mom and I joined a tour (in French with English subtitles) of the cave and learned lots about caves in general and the art of early man. It was fascinating. Photos were not allowed, but we will carry the mental images with us for years.