Sarlat and Lascaux

Sarlat-la-Caneda is considered one of the most beautiful cities in France and Wednesday is market day there, so off we went! It has an old town that is charming and quite busy on market day. As well as stalls with local delicacies such as nuts, pate, terrine, wine, sausage, cheese, there are plenty of small shops with other things to buy. We browsed, bought a few things, and had lunch at an outdoor cafe. Since it was just 4 degrees this morning, sun was important in the choice of a table. By late afternoon it was 23 degrees, though, and we had shed our sweaters. Meanwhile the large lunch, three courses, was devoured, and we waddled off to our next stop.
In the same vicinity is the Grotte de Lascaux, one of many cave areas in this part of France. We were surprised to see a very long, sleek, modern building, on our arrival. It turns out, to protect the cave paintings, they have built an exact reproduction of the caves to tour. The caves are 125 metres long, and so the building, too must be huge. A guide took us through this part. His English was good and his sense of humour better. It is a very technologically advanced exhibition. After leaving the cave reproduction area, you go into an exhibition of the various paintings and the small tablet you are wearing, with earphones attached, gives you a description of what you are seeing, in your chosen language. We also saw a 3-D presentation in a theatre, again translated through our set. Both of us thought we would not have chosen to go to Lascaux had we known we would not actually go into the caves, but it was so well done, we did not regret it at all.
We had some nervous time today when our GPS stopped working. We were on our way to the caves and found that fine, but travel in the more "backwoods" areas would be very difficult without this device. Many roads are not on the maps, and it takes many turns with little guidance from road signs to get where you are going. Thankfully, GPS had a rest and was ready to work again when we came out of the caves.Read more