Cavemen

Left, inside a rock house at Haut Castlefranc showing Henry how they built the roofs without any support. (The wood is over the doorway only). Very clever.
Centre, Henry outside the same house.
Right, looking back towards Frayssinet le Gelat, we're feeding the chickens and rabbits.

We're on our last day at Mary Moody's. (Below, it's the three storey one with blue/grey shutters). So we're trying to se up our dwindling supplies of French delicacies. Well I am, Wendy just went shopping, again. Did Cave women shop? How far back does this innate obsession go back?

We didn't find the answer at the Museum of Pre-history 2 days ago. We drove up to Les Eyzies to see the caves and thought we'd see the museum first. Unfortunately once we got going up there and visited a little hill top village on the way we only had time to see the museum. Oh well. It was well done, needed English and other language translations or at least a handheld guide. How spoilt we are! Tomorrow we go back to the area to see a couple of caves.

Some of them are as old as 50,000 years. There are animal paintings all over the area in many caves. One famous one is Lascaux which was being destroyed by the breaths of people visiting so they created another cave which is a copy. Sounds really tacky but it's meant to be good so we might get there tomorrow. Lots of the caves seem to have been damaged when people discovered them, with graffiti, restoration work gone wrong and cave ins once rubble was removed.

It is amazing enough to try and picture the people's lives in the little town and what the town has seen. But seeing the pre-historic caves is mind blowing. Driving along in our airconditioned car we can see caves up in the rock cliff faces and imagine the Cro-magnon people up there.

From Wikipedia: Cro-Magnon (IPA: [kʀomaɲõ] or anglicised IPA: /krəʊˈmægnən/) is one of the main types of Homo sapiens of the European Upper Paleolithic. It is named after the cave of Crô-Magnon in southwest France, where the first specimen was found.

The term falls outside the usual naming conventions for early humans and is used in a general sense to describe the oldest modern people in Europe, though also a specific (but very frequent) subtype among their fossil remains.

(Just so you know!)

We are going to stay 10Kms from Rocamadour, in Gramat. Rocamadour looks amazing from the pictures. We stay one night there then drive back to Montpellier. We might see a bit of Montpellier but we'll see as it might take a while to drive there. We leave the day after flying back to Franfurt Hahn. We're getting a car and are going to try to get visas sorted in Frankfurt for China. After that we're back to Fuerth for Christmas and New Year's.

Here's a cheesy grin for you. I was leaving my face fallow for a while but I've only got a goatee now. It felt a waste to shave off the whole thing. I'm so photogenic don't you think? Wendy can't stand that I always have my eyes closed for photos. I think maybe I have some Chinese ancestry and the camera senses that.