(written 11/3/2006 09:55 CET in Cambados, España)
We set off that morning to wave our cute little Sarlat goodbye, and I had picked us a few sights to see out of town around the Dordonge region.
Many of the hotels on the outskirts of town had written in the hotel book that they had wifi which we attempted to "borrow" to upload some more blogs, but to no avail. We also took a very wrong but very pretty road out of town due to the most annoying of French signs "Déviation". This is a detour to the rest of us but when you're driving anything can happen.
We eventually found the right road and headed off towards
Jardins de Marqueyssac. Pretty much the only people there, we had a great hour or so wandering along essentially a small mountain top lined with impressive gardens and offering amazing panoramic views around the surrounding countryside. It was very well sign-posted and we had been given a book with English translations of all the signs so it was a great learning experience as well.
Next, we drove through plenty more tiny villages along precariously small laneways and ended up at
La Roque St Christophe. This is a 900m long series of caves in the rock-face where human and pre-human history has been found, documented and re-created for the tourist to enjoy. Which we did, making it our token piece of learning about the history of the region.
Stomachs rumbling, we pulled into a random little road-side pizzareia called Mentalo in Les Eyzies-De-Tayac where we were pretty much the only customers. This is typically not a good sign, but this time the place was great. Two huge pizzas arrived, and filled us pretty much completely for the rest of the day with yummy meaty goodness.
Moving on from this region to
St-Emillion, famous as one of the wine regions surround Bordeaux (which we have chosen to avoid) along a mix of small and big roads (our preferred method actually), we entered the town itself and parked. The tourist office guy may have been having his first day working there as he was way overdressed and kept asking others questions but he had all the answers we needed in a language we understood.
As is typical we were given a huge book with all the region's accommodation, and as is also typical, we picked pretty much the cheapest option - a farm house about 4km out of town.
We had a quick look around the town itself, inside the Abbey and into a wine exhibition but in general wanted a place to rest for the night. Supermarket first along a big road towards Libourne, but then back to Saint-Sulpice de Faleyrens to attempt to locate our night's accommodation.
After driving up and back the main road of the region with no sign of what we were after, we pulled into the local Tabac (think newsagent and you're pretty close) to ask for directions. The woman there was very helpful and through a combination of miming and pointing at the map she has on the wall presumably for the constant flow of people not being able to find their way around this area, we found where we needed to go.
The farm stay itself (on ferme Baillarge) was nice enough, in a converted loft area in the house of a crazy old French woman who kept babbling at us long after she had established that we didn't have more than the most trivial understanding of her language. We guessed that her five or six children must have all flown the coop and that she just wanted to mother us in any way possible!
We had a small night in in our little room, playing cards and having a few supermarket drinks.