Road Trip Day #5

          We're trippin' on caves!

          We started the day at another site of ancient cave artists:  Font de Gaume.  Font de Gaume is one of the very few caves (possibly the only one) of the dozens or several hundred in Europe that still allow some visitors to come in and see the original cave drawings made by prehistoric people 15-20,000 years ago.  Almost all other such caves are now closed to all but credentialed scientists.  Thus,  normal people can only see replicas of the cave art.  But this particular cave, Font de Gaume, takes a limited number of visitors from the general public.  And there is a SIX MONTH waiting list for a ticket to see the inside!

          But we knew none of this when we picked Font de Gaume as our destination this morning.  Averil thought it seemed like a good cave (and we did know the drawings were original).  But that was it.  So at 10:15 this morning, we walked right up to the visitors' center to the ticket booth and asked if we might have a tour of the inside.  No, we were told, the tours were "complet" (full).  As we were about to leave, dissapointed, the ticket person mentioned (almost as an afterthought) that there was an English speaking tour in 45 minutes.  Would we like that?  "Sure!" we said.

          The first thing our excellent tour guide told us was how lucky we were and about how people wait six months to see this cave.  But this particular week was clear of reservations because a TV crew had been expected and they needed to keep the caves free of people and did not know when the TV crew would show up.   The TV crew had only just been able to confirm the precise date of their arrival, so the visitor's center was able to open the caves to a limited number of "walk-ins" (apparently for a few days that week).  And that just happend to be us . . . no reservation required!

          There were only seven of us in total.  And the caves were quite amazing.  The drawings, though very faded, are incredibly detailed and precise which is something I had not known before.  The artists worked by oil lamp on scaffolds and decorated the entire interior of the cave (which extends back a few hundred yards) with images of animals.  We saw probably 20-30 drawings, some very large, but this was only 5% of what was there.  Many of the drawings  are now hidden behind mineral deposits that have accumulated in the last 15,000 years.  But the details of even these drawings are visible to scientists with special lights.  Anyway, we were very lucky.  And we got to stay about an hour in the cave, which is the maximum.

           Here is a picture of us at the entrance of the cave.

          After that, we went to a different kind of cave called Grotte du Grand Roc.  This one is full of crystals and stalagtites and stalagmites and other natural formations.  It was like walking inside of a geode (or a thunder egg as we used to call them).  Some of the crystals grow sideways.  Asha took this photo:

          And that was the end of our our grotto-going adventures.  We're done with caves for a while.  After walking around inside the geode (above), we drove 4 hours to where we are now:  a town called Valencay.  Tomorrow afternoon we'll head north to St. Malo.

          Now it's almost midnight and I'm in the hotel lobby and the janitor is vacuuming my feet so I'm going to bed.  I'll close with a couple of pictures from yesterday that I was unable to upload/download/whatever load last night when I originally intended to.

"The too noisy children are requested leave to respect the other visitors."