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)