France Days 13 - 16: Cliffs, Caves, and Canoes

This area of France is loaded with steep cliffs made of soft limestone and shaped by rivers like the Dordogne, which means that every few feet you'll find signs for: cliffside villages, caves, and places to play in the river. 

It was hard to narrow down our options but we only have a few days in the area so we tried to experience a bit of everything.

Day 13: Rocamadore, Fancy meal, Gouffre de Padirac, and Foie Gras

As Paul mentioned in the last post, we stayed the night in Rocamadore, a beautiful village carved into a cliff. So the first thing we did in the morning was explore it a bit. 

Paul took this photo of the village from the very top.

It's just a few simple streets that wind steeply up to the top of the cliff where a castle and church are located. I love these cute little easy-to-walk villages.

After exploring and trying some more French pastries from the local boulangerie (sidenote: We've tried four boulangeries so far...and I'm not understanding the American obsession with French pastries yet. They've all been...fine. As good as the stuff you can get from an American grocery store. Maybe Paris will be different?), it was time to get dressed up fancy for our Michelin restaurant experience.

Since this is a trip in celebration of our 20th wedding anniversary, we decided to try ONE fancy restaurant. I don't typically like to spend that kind of money on one meal, so this was a special occasion.

We found one that where the chef was passionate about using only French food and he also loved finding some food from all the regions of France. We both got a different course (there's only 2-3 options per meal) so we could try as much fancy food as possible. 

It was delicious, and I loved how the chef came out personally to tell us about everything on our plates. I'm glad we tried a fancy restaurant, and it's something fun to try once in a lifetime.

Next up, we chose to go to Gouffre de Padirac, a cave that a few French folks told us to check out. It was SOOO hard to choose just one cave, but I'm really glad we chose this one. 

It's normal to visit a cave in fancy clothes, right?

Paul loves water and he loves caves, and this was our first time ever seeing a cave that has both, so an underground boat was part of the experience. His face was lit up with joy during the entire boat ride. He's so cute.

It was an incredibly beautiful cave. I think it was my favorite cave we've been to so far in all of our adventures. Pictures don't do it justice, but we tried.

After our delightful time in the caves, we returned to Rocamadore. Before crashing for the night though, we drove to the very top, where there's a parking lot so you can walk the ramparts. I naively thought it wouldn't be scary, even though I'm terrified of heights. But instead, it was one of those places where you're like halfway up, learn it's going to be terrifying, and it's too late to turn around. 

Paul was very kind to me as I bravely attempted to do the same things that the little kids in front of me were doing without a care in the world. The worst part was the stairs to get back down to normalness. I essentially crawled down them while staring at Paul's head and holding onto his shirt like a lifeline. 

But I did it! And Paul isn't tired of me STILL talking about how brave I was (3 days later). Here's red circles on the super scary parts that we walked on. The smaller red circle on the stairs was the most insane staircase ever. Here's hoping that I never do that type of terror again.

To end this rather full day, we celebrated by buying Foie Gras from a local farm. It was our first time eating pure foie gras. It was INCREDIBLE. I might be more obsessed with foie gras than I am with beef tartare. It's all I want to eat for lunch now. 

Naturally, one must enjoy local red wine in classy paper cups with foie gras.

Day 14: More Cliffside Villages, More Castles, and a "Garden"

Today, we set off for a cute cliffside village called La Roque-Gageac. This one is super cute because it's on a river, so the whole village is squeezed between a river and a cliff. 

Above the adorable village, there's troglodyte ruins, where ancient people used to live INSIDE the nooks and crannies of the cliff (you can see the holes in the cliffs in the picture above). Paul went up there (it involved another terrifying staircase, and I learned my lesson!) and had beautiful views.

When he came back down, we did a rather long scenic hike of the entire village, and then sat by the river to eat some lunch (a sandwich from a boulangerie, it was...okay). Then, just a few minutes down the road, we went to see Marqueyssac Gardens.

This place was kinda disappointing. The rich aristocrat who designed this "garden" many many years ago had only one plant he liked: boxwood. We assumed there would be pretty boxwood designs, with flowers inside the designs. But there were only a few flowers. Mainly, it was boxwoods for miles and miles.

There were some cool boxwood designs to check out

Oh, and there wasn't a map, so Paul and I were only going to stop for a short time, and ended up doing many miles of walks, because it was like a huge labyrinth of boxwoods that seriously went on forever. 

Since looking at endless pictures of boxwoods is almost as boring as walking endless miles in boxwoods, here's a picture of Paul from inside the house at this place. Why was there a Michelin exhibit in a French aristocrat home? No idea, every plaque was written in French. But it was still amusing!

Okay, fine. I'll share one more cool picture of boxwoods. They are really really good with pruners at this garden. I wonder why...

After getting lost in a boxwood forest/labyrinth, my ankle, which, for the most part, has been doing pretty darn good on this trip so far, decided that that was enough walking for the day. 

But we had a castle on the list! So I told my ankle to shut up and give me just a little bit more time to enjoy a castle. Castelnaud-la-Chapelle was just 5 minutes down the road from the "gardens" so we decided to check it out.

Unfortunately, what they don't tell you is that you have to park pretty far away and walk for a mile or so, up and down some hills and through a village, to get to the castle. By the time we got to the castle, my ankle was done. 

I vaguely paid attention to things, but frankly, I was too tired and in pain to really be in awe of this castle, which is a bummer. But we got to watch a trebuchet demo! That was pretty cool.

After the castle, we were both exhausted. We've been packing our days and walking many miles in the hot sun. Fortunately, the airbnb for this night has a pool and hot tub. So we soaked our achy bodies in both and crashed hard in our blissful air-conditioned room.

Day 15: Canoe time!

We woke up sore and exhausted from all of our busy days, so we decided to be a bit lazy today by doing a scenic canoe trip down the river. It was absolutely beautiful - so many pretty cliffs, castles, cliffside villages! And the water was super clear and cold. Whenever we got hot, we'd pull over and jump in and swim for a bit. Here's a few pictures. It was hard to choose just a few.

Where we stopped by lunch and a swim

Cute village AND Castle AND hot wife AND Arched bridge!!! SOOO CUTE!

MORE cuteness....France has too much cute stuff!

Someone's private residence....a cute castle

This shows how clear the water is (and more cute village/castle combos)

We were on the water all day long - from 9:30am until 4pm, so even though we were "lazy" (the river current did almost all of the work), we were happily exhausted from another wonderful adventure. We ended with more pool and hot tub at our place and again, crashed hard into a deep sleep.

Day 16: More Cool Cliffside Things

We had a long list of places to see today, but, as you can tell from this ONE blog post, we've been doing a lot lately, and our bodies are just worn out. It's all fun things, and sometimes it's so hard to say NO to a once-in-a-lifetime cool thing to visit. But, we do want to find the balance between adventure and relaxing and that means listening to our bodies.

So our long list of things to do today were narrowed down to only two things - and then we went to our airbnb (one last night of air conditioning so we want to take advantage of that as well as the pool!) to nap and chill.

First up, we visited Maison Forte Reignac, which is the only intact cliff castle that exists in France today. It was really different than the other castles we've seen! It was small - and part domestic house and yet also with random arrow slits in rooms and such so they could defend it if necessary. It was not only built into the cliff, but also had some troglodyte ruins above it.

Paul had perfect timing with this pic as a fancy car drove past

The back rooms in this entire castle were uneven cliff walls

They had tons of original/antique/old furniture and paintings throughout the home and it was very nicely staged.

The ceiling of this room was the cliff/rock and there was a hole in the center for letting out fireplace smoke.

Apparently, they hired an alchemist to stay in this shack in the troglodyte ruins (less likely to harm the castle with his experiments)

Next, we went about 10 minutes down the road to check out La Roque St. Christophe. This was another old troglodyte ruins, but also - in the medieval period, they built a town on top of the prehistoric ruins because they were tired of Viking raids from the river below. 

The medieval cliffside village was five levels high and held as many as 1,000 people. It was really cool to see the ruins! It's hard to get good pics of it, so here's an image of what it use to look like.

Lengthwise, the longest part was 1 kilometer (.6 miles). We walked it and checked out the ruins and all the info that was shared about it. 

There were also cool medieval lifting machines there to show the different clever ways that these folks could lift things from the ground and bring it up to their village. This specific village had very little iron/metal, so most of their machines were made of wood. It was cool to see their ingenuity with limited knowledge at the time.

This was my favorite - two men would be like hamsters in the middle to make the lift work.

Overall, we've had lots and lots of fun in this region of France. There's lots to do - and if you love cliffs and/or caves - you'll love all the options here! 

We're now halfway done with our France adventures - and that means we're getting really tired. The adrenaline from the 'newness' of a different country is wearing down. Hopefully, we'll spend a few days in the next week being a bit more relaxed. But who knows! Maybe we'll just sleep for a whole month when we get back to make up for all this fun. 

Here's a creepy dog and a ghost (on the wall above the plant)

France days 10-12 - Culinary Delights and Dizzying Heights

 The adventures continue in the south of France. We've been in the Avignon area for a few days looking at old stuff, but today is something a bit different... TRUFFLES!

Letting the dog smell the truffle to let him know we're done digging

We went on a tour of a truffle farm and got to follow the dogs as they sniffed around oak trees to find truffles. They quickly found the scent and started digging, at which point the farmers had to stop them so they don't damage the valuable fungi. Then we just slowly dug, scraped, and pried until the truffle popped free. It was a lot of work but it was worth the truffle. 

After digging a bunch we got a nice bag full and went to the air conditioned barn where the farmer made us a bunch of truffle appetizers. 

Yep, that's truffled ice cream (and a glass of champagne)

All the food was super delicious. This was our first time having truffles (besides the fake truffle cheese junk and the Truff hot sauce which is just poison). By the end the other people on the tour got full or sick of it or something so Cris and I went around and ate all the leftover truffles. Cris even palmed a few shavings for later. Every morning is a good morning when you get to pet dogs.

That took much of the day and we were hot so to cool off we stopped by the Grottes of Thouzon (a little cave) on the way home. It was pretty but there were some rude dutch people making noises the whole time. You know what they say, "If you're a Dutch then you ain't worth much". 

For some reason this cave had a ton of really skinny stalactites like noodles hanging down so it was extra pokey. Should we call them spaghettites or stalactghetti? The guide only spoke French so most of my questions remain unanswered. Like why are the Dutch so rude?

We also stopped for our first French wine tasting which was great. The guy doing the pours was really nice and talked decent English so we had our first real conversation of the trip. Well, sometimes we talk to each other. 

We don't know much about wine but these tasted good. A bunch of Syrah and Grenache grapes?

The next day we were heading to Carcassonne but saw an Abbey along the way so we stopped. It ended up being really neat and I love a self-guided tour where you can just mess around at your own pace.

Abbaye de Fontfroide

They also had a pretty garden which some of us are obsessed with.

That took a bit longer than expected as well as lunch (and we stopped for a gin/whisky tasting) so we didn't get to Carcassonne until after the ramparts closed. 

Lunch with those people on the river in Trebes

Side note: The French have a reputation for being rude and not liking tourists. We have had nothing but good interactions with people. As long as you say 'Bonjour' when you first see someone they'll treat you well. We always forget to use our translation app so we spent a good 5 minutes in a cheese shop with a jolly guy trying to communicate which cheeses we want. It was awkward but he never stopped being cheerful and helpful. Basically, just be polite and try to speak a bit of their language and they'll meet you halfway. 

Even after the ramparts closed we could still wander the old city of Carcassonne, so on a whim I downloaded an app called VoiceMap. It's an audio guide that automatically plays based on GPS. You just follow the directions and walk while the guide talks (in headphones) and explains all sorts of history and architecture stuff. It was our favorite tour we've ever been on, highly recommended. And Carcassonne is insane.

The next morning we got to go up on the walls of Carcassonne. We have a "Passion Monuments" pass so this and a few other sights are already paid for, otherwise I don't know that it was worth the price to go up there. It was cool, but so was the walk on ground level. 

Next we're up in Rocamadour which is a bunch of buildings built into a cliffside, so stay tuned for that. But on the way was the 4 castles hike. We've learned through our travels that we enjoy more freeform, guide-yourself type of adventures so this hike was perfect. There are four castle ruins all on one mountain ridge.

This pic looks kinda fake but I promise we were there

It was a strenuous hike to get to all of them but it was well worth it. Each castle had its own charm: one was just a circle which had a tiny entrance I had to crawl through, another had a series of arched rooms that were once barracks, and the last had a tight spiral staircase leading up four floors. 

After adventuring through each castle we came back to the car exhausted so decided to skip Albi Cathedral. Later days. After a couple hour drive we arrived at Rocamadour which is more touristy than we like but still cool. We're here before the French high-season so there's only a few dozen other people staying here.

The view from our parking spot

More Rocamadour is coming in our next blog post, how is that for a cliff hanger (get it, cuz cliffs. This city is on a cliff. Do you get it yet?)

Oh, and I'm a knight now

France Days 7 - 9: Checking out Roman Empire Stuff (in France?!?)

We left the beautiful mountains of the northeastern side for the southeast region of France called Avignon. We were already prepped and ready for the southeast to be super hot (it is the Mediterranean region, after all), so the insane heat wave affecting France right now didn't severely change the heat that already exists in this region of France. 

BUT. 

Folks, I do these trips partly to avoid summer heat from my home-state of South Carolina. And this heat is just bonkers. I'm looking forward to HOPEFULLY getting cooler temps soon (I say 'hopefully' because, originally, the heat wave was supposed to end in two days, but it already looks like there's a second heat wave that's going to batter us when we go to areas that are usually a delightful temp...but that's future Cris and Paul's problem).

We decided to go to the heat-filled region mainly for one reason: Ancient Roman stuff!!! When we were doing our research, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there were quite a few Roman ruins we could see in this area. So that's the main theme for the three-ish days we're adventuring in this part. 

Day Seven: Travel, Cute Cliffside Village, and Opera

Today was a travel day, as we left the mountains for the Mediterranean climate. It was four hours of driving today, so we decided to stop half way to this adorable cliffside village, Pont-en-Royans. 

It's a super cute medieval village that is nestled on the cliff with a river and waterfall at the bottom. It was fun walking the village and staring at the unique architecture of each house in the cliff wall. Plus, they have this fun water feature by the river so folks can cool off in this hotter region of France.

We walked around and I ogled all the buildings, and then we ate lunch. It was the best burger I've ever eaten in my life. I should have bought three more for the road. It's all I'm thinking about and I want more. (Also, random sidenote: on past trips, Paul has been the one obsessed with some sort of food - like seafood chowder - but this time, it might be me as I am currently obsessed with beef tartare and I can't stop eating it. Mmm...).

After that amazing lunch, we grabbed groceries and found our new airbnb for the next few days. It has air-conditioning, so it has been BLISS. We cooled off for a bit in the ac and then headed to Orange, France.

First, we stopped at the Arc de Triomphe. Most people only know about the one in Paris, which we already don't want to visit because Paris is too busy to drive in. But this Arc de Triumph is also well-preserved and there was hardly anyone else around. I LOVE that crowd-less feature and we soaked in the beauty for quite a while. 

Next up, we got all culture-fancy by going to listen to an Opera Singer. Maybe she's famous, but we're not actually REALLY culture-fancy (just pretending) so I have no idea. Her name is Nadine Sierra if that helps. The really cool part was that it was done in the Théâtre antique d'Orange, which is a Roman Theatre (!!) that's still standing and used. 

It was soooooo cool to admire the brilliant engineering that allows for such great acoustics without need of a microphone. The singing was beautiful, the building was equally beautiful, but the heat was almost unbearable. Fortunately, it cooled off when the sun set. She was still doing encores at 11pm, but we could barely keep our eyes open and still needed to drive 45 minutes to our place, so we snuck out and hit the road. We fell asleep instantly, after a great day of sites.

Day 8: Checking Out Roman Things in Arles

Despite our late night, we woke up super early to beat the heat. You know the saying: "when in Rome Avignon, do what the Romans French do". The French over in this hotter Avignon region do things in the morning, then take siestas during the heat, and then do things again. So we decided to give it a try.

Today's plans were mainly to do a walking tour of the town Arles. Again, it's a place heavily influenced by the Roman Empire. The center of the town has lots and lots of Roman ruins/things to check out, and most tourists do the walking tour in order to see all the good stuff.

We saw SOOOO many Roman ruins in this area! It's hard to keep track of them all. Here's a few of them: 

Roman Gladiator Arena (Amphitheater)

Roman Theater

Roman Baths

Roman Cryptoporticus (a somewhat mysterious underground cavern - it was delightfully cool down there)

Saint-Trophime Cloister ("only" a 15th century building....boo! Just kidding - still cool)

We ambled around beautiful streets of old old old buildings and took in all the sights from these ruins. If you like Vincent Van Gogh, there's stuff to do in Arles around that topic, too, but Paul and I aren't really into art so we didn't check them out.

After lots and lots of walking, plus our night of very little sleep, we were exhausted and overheating. We planned to go home, cool off, and then go do some other things, but we ended up passing out for a deep nap and didn't feel like leaving the beloved ac for more things. That's okay. Arles gave us plenty of pictures and memories and it was wonderful to spend the day there.

Day 9: Avignon Palace of the Popes and Aquaducts

Today we headed to the city of Avignon to check out the Palace of the Popes. For a brief history lesson, this is where the Popes moved the Christian capital/center for a bunch of years during the Great Schism drama in the 1300s. The popes (six of them) were determined to pretend that Avignon could be like a 'new Rome' and powerhouse for the church, so they went all out with stuff in Avignon. 

There's fortified walls and beautiful buildings all over the place in this city. And the most glorious was where the Popes lived/worked: The Palace of the Popes.

It's a huge place, and the reviews said to expect it to take 2-3 hours to do the tour. So we left early again to beat the heat and got there just as the doors were opening.

While it might not have been the most beautiful place we've been (architecture was great but nothing special and there's no artwork or furniture, etc.), it was still overwhelmingly awe-inspiring. They wanted us common folks to be filled with awe by making all the ceilings and rooms super huge. (Alas, despite the large rooms, the hallways still were small and challenging for my Tall Paul).

The Palace of the Popes started out as a great tour, but, by the end, the tour groups were crowding the rooms and it was getting HOT in there. I cannot even imagine how awful it is in that building by 3pm. As it was, by the end, I was close to hyperventilating because the crowds and pressing heat was really getting to me. I was grateful for the end.

By the time we were done, we were starving. We were originally going to drive out of the city to find lunch (we really really hate cities), but we were so hungry that we made the mistake of grabbing sandwiches from the Square - a tourist no-no because it's garbage food made for tourists and not for locals. Sigh...we knew better but we really were sooooo hungry. Hopefully that's the worst food on our trip and I'll try to put a granola bar in my purse for emergencies next time.

We gratefully drove in our ac-cold car for the ride back. We stopped next at Pont du Gard, which is one of the best preserved Roman aquaduct bridges in the world. It was super cool to see that architecture and insanely HUGE ruin/structure.

We planned on swimming there in the river underneath it, but you guys, the HEAT was insane. Our swimming stuff was in the car, so we hiked back to the car and by then we were SO hot, we were miserable and a bit sick. So we headed back to our beloved ac-cooled airbnb to recoup.

After a lovely siesta, we went to a winery (finally! Why did we wait this long to get wine in France?!?) and then went swimming on the river, right next to the Pont du Gard. What a way to end the day! Don't mind us, just casually swimming by ancient ruins....

Overall, it's been a great few days, full of amazing history. We're exhausted every night and extremely tired of this heat, but we're still having a fabulous time. I'm glad we could add Roman history to our French adventure!