To market, to market....

Saturday 19^th April

We started out the day early to head to the market in the old town of Sarlat le Caneda. This is reported to be one of the best markets in France. We were nice and early and a lot of the stalls were still setting up – and not a lot of people there which meant we had a good look around unhindered. One section of the town was mostly food items and the ‘main’ street was clothes, bags, and other stuff. Sadly there did not seem to be a lot of tasting opportunities and Rob missed out on his pate. We’ll keep trying. It was interesting to see the shoppers build and tourist groups arrive and tour through the market. A few American accents heard here and there and even one small group of Australians. We watched one cheese stall as a queue built and the shoppers picked a small piece of this and a bit of that. The queue was very patient.  Again we had people with their dogs! I don’t get it. We filled in a couple of hours here before hitting the road.

We just had to buy some strawberries
- they were everywhere

Paella - shame it was too early for lunch.

Nougat. Yum!!

Huge cheeses everywhere.

One of our cameras has died, or to be more exact, I think I killed it. It didn’t like being dropped on the floor. We’ll just have to manage with the one camera for now.

We took a scenic drive along the Dordogne Valley and there were lots of chateaux to take photos of. There were too many to get photos of all of them so we only stopped for the easy photo. We both felt that this is a truly beautiful part of France and would have liked a bit more time here.

 

Chateau Castelnaud

Chateau Beynac

Didn't see a sign for this one, but got the photo.
The chateaux are everywhere in this part of France,
and all a bit different and very impressive.

Next stop was a castle/fortress built in to the side of the cliff face. We did a tour through here and it was incredible to see how they had carved out the rock, and how impenetrable it would be. The only real weak point is the entry door and they had that well covered. As part of their tour they had a room with instruments of torture from the middle ages. Pretty gruesome and I was happy to leave that room. Again, there was a dog on the tour!?!

 

La Maison Forte de Reignac.
A steep climb just to get up to the main entrance.

It was cold in there.
 I'm sure they would have had a much bigger fire than we had today.

The dining room.

In recent times, this bell was rung when Paris was liberated,
and rung all day when peace was declared in 1945.

The internal staircase.

Further along and we went to see some cave paintings dating back 17,000 years - not as old as aboriginal cave paintings, but still pretty impressive. The cave we were in was actually an exact replica of the real cave that was discovered in 1940. The original cave had been open to the public until 1963 but the paintings were degrading so they closed the caves and set about replicating them. The paintings were amazing – bulls 3.5 metres long and the artist had good perspective. No photos allowed so we can’t show you what we saw. On this tour you could only bring your domestic pet if you carried it in your arms!?! Thankfully there were no dogs on this tour.

A couple of photos below for a couple of people.

Alison - for you.

Matthew - one for you

Mandy - a new business for Gerard.
Signs already done and the patchwork shop is right next door.

Now we are in Limoges and have just been and looked at the railway station which is pretty impressive. Tomorrow we plan a tour of the porcelain museum and then head further north west.

A lot of places we have been there have been tulips in flower.
These ones are at the station at Limoges.

Limoges station.

The dog is off to Paris on the 8.05pm train.