Scouting trip week 1

Welcome to the 10th post of our “Baby Boomers Move to France” blog. I’m starting this week’s blog on 3/23 to get a head start on it before we actually start the flights to France. The plan is to publish on 3/30 from Bergerac, France. We will have already stayed in Sarlat, but I will let you know all about our Sarlat stay first. I have to remember that we will be 6 hours ahead of our friends that are on Florida time and 9 hours ahead of my family in California. Elizabeth keeps in touch on WhatsApp. She is way more tech savvy than I am.

Packing

We will start packing this afternoon, Monday. Our flight out of Sarasota is at around 6:00 pm on Tuesday. It seems like we will have a lot of time, but we will have to plan our Tuesday carefully. Getting the animals ready, getting the house ready for showings and last-minute stuff. We have about a 2-hour layover at JFK. I’m glad for that because of the likely event that our flight from SRQ is delayed. I’m usually more optimistic but history has taught me about airplane travel. Just when you take the schedules for granted, BOOM!

As I mentioned last week, because of the cool weather expected in France, we will want to wear layers while in France. Packing can be a little tricky because we want to fit everything into two small carryon bags and 2 backpacks. (The French call backpacks “sac a dos”. I love it.) Including travel days, the trip is only 17 days, how hard can packing be? Right? We might be using vacuum bags.

Getting Rosie and Artemis settled

Tuesday morning, we will be busy getting Rosie and Artemis settled in at the kennel, Ace Pet Resort in Sarasota on Clark Road east of I75. We have used Ace for years and have never been disappointed. We will take their beds and plenty of food and snacks for them and schedule daily walks. They will be well taken care of. I hope they will want to come home with us when we get back.

The flight to Paris

Well all my concerns were for nothing. Both flights were great. Elizabeth booked us on Jet Blue. Having never flown Jet Blue, I was a little concerned. The flight from SRQ to JFK was on time and the flight staff was excellent. The same goes for the flight from JFK to CDG (Charles de Gaulle). We picked up our rental car and stayed at the Holiday Inn near the airport for the night. We had a glass of wine and a small pizza and called it a night.

Driving in France

The drive from Paris to Sarlat was nice except for some reason our GPS wasn’t working. The map of Paris got us out of the airport and onto the loop that circles Paris. The loop was as bad as any traffic jam that I had ever seen. We did make progress though. The signage was very good so we stayed on A10 and followed the signs. If you are ever driving in the area, watch out for the crazy motorcycles drivers. They come between cars and trucks, weaving in and out of traffic like it’s nothing.

Once we cleared the city the drive was smooth sailing. It was a beautiful day for a drive. We stopped along the way and managed to pull up gps for the remainder of the trip. You would be surprised at how much you depend on the lady on the gps telling you when to turn. We didn’t have that feature though and managed to turn a 5 to 6 hour trip into close to 9 hours, but we did see a lot of the country. Very pretty rolling hills and farm land.
The car is a little Fiat 500 hybrid. NOT a road car. It has a 6 speed manual shift transmission that took me a little time to get back in the groove of shifting and clutching, but I did and didn’t stall once. The car has no power going up some of the hills though. It reminded me of a movie from ages ago where the first guy asks the second guy what kind of a car he drives. The second guy says, “It’s a Rolls.” The first guy says, “Huh?” The second guy says, “It’s a Roll Canardly” then explains that it rolls down one hill and can hardly get up the next”. Luckily my brilliant down shifting skills got us up all of hills.

Sarlat

Sarlat is a very pretty medival town. Once we got in Sarlat we were able to find a parking spot and did recon of the town to find our VRBO. Should be easy, but again gps didn’t help and the directions are in French. With a little help from the locals we found our place at #2 Rue Lakanal. The instructions for getting in are in French too. Elizabeth figured out how to use the code on the keypad to unlock the main door to the place and she knew that our apartment is on the second floor. In France the second floor is the third floor in America speak. The French call the 1st floor the ground floor. Anyway we figured it out in the dark climbing narrow stairs eventually to the “second” floor. I turned on my phone flashlight after the harrowing climb and found the white door as defined by the instructions. We expected to find another key pad to enter the code and get in. No key pad. We couldn’t find a light switch either. We stumbled back down stairs and searched for a clue. Then decided to go find a nice place to sit and regroup. We happened to find some tables and chairs outside a little cafe. A nice lady alerted the guy inside and he came out and took our order for 2 glasses of wine and we settled into solving our problem. We took out the French language instructions and used google translate to get into it in more detail. In the meantime Elizabeth had tried calling the owner of the place we were going to stay in.

Thanks to google we translated some of the words and realized that the second code isn’t for the apartment door. It is for a little box that contains the door keys. We went back to the VRBO and tried out our new information. We found the box, figured out how to access the keypad and like magic we had the key. While we were looking for a light switch in the lobby, our landlord walked in. He had driven over in a rush. We explained that we figured it out and apologized for dragging him out. He said it was no problem, then turned on the lights and guided us upstairs to our place and showed us in. Once in, we put down our backpacks and headed back out to retrieve our luggage from the car. The car was not parked too far away. Elizabeth had asked the guy where we got the wine about parking. There is paid public parking area across the street. He told us that it is pretty expensive to park overnight and that in fact there are a lot of free parking spots in the city until April 1. April is the start of tourist season then you pay.
We went to find free parking and found a perfect spot. After a little over an hour we went back to check on the car and realized that we were parked in a paid parking spot. We eventually found a free spot within easy walking distance.

Above pictures of Rocamadour. The fortified church is built right into the cliff. Steep stairs everywhere and picture of the winding path to the church and finally a picture of one of the chapels. Pictures do not do it justice!

Rocamadour

We had booked a tour of the ancient town of Rocamodour. We left our VRBO early so as not to be late for the tour. It is a good thing that we got an early start. We were walking and got a little turned around and we were concerned that we might be late. Luckily we asked some locals for help and they set us in the right direction. The French are so nice. We arrived at the Hotel Renoir 5 minutes early and met our tour guide David. He was ready to go so we jumped in his Citroen van and headed to Rocamadour. The ride over was about 45 minutes and we saw more of the beautiful French countryside. Our guide explained that the main industries in the area are agriculture and tourism. The agriculture includes walnuts, apples, asparagus, strawberries and others. By the way, the walnut trees were just starting to bud. In another couple of weeks and the leaves will be in all their glory.

I took a bunch of pictures and soon realized that I wouldn’t be able to do the town justice. I will share some photos anyway, just know it is 10 times better in person than the pictures. The history of the town is amazing. A monk built a chapel near the River in the 9th century. People started to come to worship at the little chapel, it became an important pilgrimage site. In the 11th century the Catholic Church decided that.it was so important that they built a fortified church. It is still in use today. There is much more to the story including legends and miracles.
The structured is built of limestone and fossils can still be seen in some of the stones.

This church is home to The Black Madonna, famous as the protector of sailors. By the way she is one of three and is carved from walnut wood which turns black over time. Hence the name. This particular piece was probably carved in the 9th century by the monk named Amadour. He was eventually made a saint. By the way walnuts are one of the cash crops of the area.

I must say that I wish that I could have seen this 20 years ago. Climbing up and down the stairs wore this little old man out. If you can figure out a way to visit France and see these historic sites, do it while you are younger.

On the ride over to Rocamadour, we crossed over a bridge that was designed by Eiffel, the guy that designed the Eiffel Tower. The bridge is superb. The trip to Rocamadour was a real treat.
We got back in time do some exploring in Sarlat and found a nice little restaurant that served a Rocamadour special. Excellent!

Farmers market

We wake up every morning to the sound of church bells . It seems like Saturday is special as the bells continued extra long. Well it is special. Saturday is “market day”. The Sarlat market is one of the biggest in the Dordogne. Wow! It is huge. The big thing is produce, but there is everything including mattresses, knives, leather good, clothing, olives, sausage, pallela, jewelry, pottery, and on and on. We bought a baguette and duck sausage and a couple of sweet rolls with chocolate inside. This Saturday market has been going on every Saturday for centuries.

The cave at Lascaux

Elizabeth wanted to check out a small town called Montignac because she had seen some reasonably priced houses there. After walking around the Sarlat market we took a short drive to Montignac. We had a pleasant surprise, this is right at Lascaux where the reproduction of the prehistoric cave paintings of Cromagnon man are beautifully presented. This is something that I wasn’t sure that we could fit in on this scouting trip. We got to fit in and it is ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!!

We did walk around Montignac. It is just another gorgeous place. We didn’t find a dream house, but it remains on the growing list.

Sarlat market. This is just one street of the market that stretches around the curve and is spread over a couple of streets. We had a vendor right outside the door to our VRBO building. What a treat.

Sorry this post went so long. There is soooo much to talk about. We are in Bergerac now and will spend 3 days here. It is Sunday so most shops are closed, but we did find a nice wine bar with outdoor seating near the Dordogne River, had a wine and enjoyed the sunshine. Next week we will share some notes on the drive from Sarlat to Bergerac. Very pretty scenery and a couple of gorgeous little towns. Of course we will share some thoughts about Bergerac.