The Dordogne

Canoeing on the Vezier

It seems like the obvious answer but the Brits probably enjoy the DORDOGNE for its eating and drinking opportunities - especially interesting if you don’t mind the means of production of Fois gras and charcuterie.  Apart from that, there are fairytale castles and slow moving rivers.  This really is the land of the Michelin guides, with pretty (or prettified) villages, woodlands, the occasional vista, many cultural experiences around prehistory, cave art and handicrafts.
It's very green - lots and lots of trees, and these tend to obstruct long vistas, so if you are a horizon sort of person, maybe this is not for you. 

Winter can be cold here - double figures below are unusual, but not impossible. We did have a look at a house that was for sale, and it confirmed the old saw about getting what you pay for.  Perfectly nice, and on the French market, probably worth the 200,000 € they were asking, but a long way from the 'dream home'.  As some of you know, we are thinking about relocation relocation, so this was a useful bit of benchmarking.
    We also visited LASCAUX IV - the huge, new International Centre for Cave Art.  As you may know, this centre mimics the famous cave paintings, reproduced on mouldings of the original cave walls.  Sure, it's not the real thing, but allows safe viewing of the images.  Lots of technology used to enhance the experience.  Actually, the most exciting experience was an interactive art display featuring painting that had some relationship to the Lascaux images.  Hard to describe this so here's a pic.

Lascaux IV

There are 6 different stations and you can use them to choose sequences to display, folowing different intuitions or logic or even dreams.  I could have spent all day here!  It was also air conditioned.

The only human figure at Lascaux - birdhead man

Returning via Chalais, the landscape became less wooded, but quite flat.  We're talking here about the area around Bergerac. We spent the night at Chalais, with Al's 87 year old 'cousine', Choute,  (don't ask.)  She has a summer home in Cognac - sorry no pix - it's an old 'pigoniere' or pigeon cote. Converted in the mid 80s, it's a place where she feels in contact with Pierre, her hsband who died 10 years ago.  It was clearly a place that the family came to stay - the empty bunk beds echo the passing of that time. Now her family have their own lives, even their own grandchildren, so the visits have fallen away.  At one time she was going to sell but now, fitted with a couple of stents, continues to make the 5 hour trip from Paris in her 12 year old Megane, which she drives like a teenage boy.

Thinking....

Back in Charron, playing a waiting game with the yard, who are doing some of the work that came up in the survey.  On the way back from Chalais, we revived the 'sell or sail' debate. These photos sum it up for me:

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Going Aganst the Flow