La Vézère River

Today, Wendy and I went to Périgueux to visit the Lascaux Cave where prehistoric cave paintings were found.

This morning I set two alarm clocks so I wouldn't miss our train. It was a good thing that I set two alarm clocks since I didn't get up for the first. I left the house around 7:45 and I took the tram to Victoire and then walked to the train station, which is probably a 15 minute walk. I met Wendy in front of the ticket windows and we bought our tickets. Then we bought some pastries for breakfast at the Paul pastry cart. I heard some pretty good reviews about Paul and I would have to say that chocolate chipped croissant-like pastry was rather good.

We got onto our train and it left promptly at 8:27 A.M. We looked out the window and talked our whole train ride. I have never really spent much time with Wendy before so we talked about ourselves and got to know each other better. We also commented on the lovely French countryside and how there is so much to see in France. Before we knew it we were in Périgueux. Périgueux is only about an hour and fifteen minutes away from Bordeaux, so the ride went by relatively fast.

When we got to our destination, we found ourselves with no idea of what to do. This weekend trip was really spontaneous and the only planning we did was find a hotel and how to get to the closest cave train station. Well we saw a sign for the tourism office and so we decided to go there for some information. On the way we kinda lost, so we asked a "sympa" (nice) man, as Wendy had described him, working on the sidewalk. We asked him how to get to the tourism office and we only got bits and pieces as to what he said. We heard, behind Monoprix, Caps movie theater, and pass the roundabout. We made one wrong turn, but after that we found the office. Wendy and I celebrated our mini-victory and we hoped for the best for the trip.

After we spoke to the tourism lady, we didn't know what to do next. We said, "bon" and "alors" (well, so) and contemplated what to do. Well we decided to go to the cave, but that would require going back to the train station. We got there and bought our ticket for the 12:45 train, with some minor difficulty. We had an hour or so to kill, so we just explored Périgueux a bit. We saw all the Gallo-Roman ruins and we awed at how such old ruins are just "chilling" right next to some pretty modern buildings.

When it got closer to our departure we walked back to the train station and hopped on the bus. Yes, bus. They said that there was so work on the railroads, so we had to take a bus instead. Well after about an hour or so, we got to the Condat-Le-Lardin train station. It was a little, quaint train station with only two platforms. There was a small parking lot and one sympa train station man, as we called him. We were a bit flustered about how to get to the caves so we asked the train station man and he said we would have to take a taxi since there were no buses to get there. He called the taxi service for us and after a while the taxi arrived.

We hopped onto the taxi and the taxi driver, who was also sympa, took us to Lascaux II. When we got there, he gave us a little discount on the fare and we also asked how long it was to get to the nearest town, Montignac. He said about two kilometers and then asked when we would be done. I said we didn?t know, but we would call for taxi when we were ready.

While we waited for the tour to begin, we met some "friends," actually some Anglophones. They asked us where we were from and we were happy to meet some English speakers in such a remote part of France. The cave tour was really informative and it was amazing to see the amazing replica of the original cave paintings. The cave was just like the real thing. The paintings were extremely well done, the texture of the cave was well duplicated, and the temperature of the cave was even really cold perhaps just like the real one.

When we were done, we decided to walk to town. However, as we were walking, one of our English friends honked at us as they were driving by. Wendy and I said to each other, they didn't even stop to give us a lift. Some friends! Haha. We got to Montignac, ate a late lunch, explored the town a bit, and then called for a taxi to get back to the train station. It was the same sympa taxi driver. He even gave us another discount on the fare. We bought our tickets to get back to Périgueux and we had to wait for more than an hour for the next train, since we barely missed the train. We had thought there was an earlier one, but we failed to notice that it didn't run on Fridays.

The train station man asked us how the cave was and then told us to just walk around a bit to kill some time. And so we did. We even bought dinner and breakfast at the Petit Casino (a grocery store), since we figured that when we got back to Périgueux everything would be closed.

The time came and found our hotel with no difficulty at all. We stayed at an Ibis hotel right next to the Dordogne River.