Sat 28.May.2011
Paris, France
Aquitaine
The south-west corner of France, with its major city
Bordeaux, and its famous vinyards and fruit fields.
I have family there - distant cousins on the Italian side.
They were good enough to put me up - and put up with me - for a week.
Cousin Carolina lives at the top of a stair that would do justice
to Hogwarts itself, in the old part of Bordeaux.
Her parents Tino and Martine put me up in their nice suburban
home in the small town of Tonneins.
The Rivers
The major river of Aquitaine is the Garonne, on which Bordeaux sits,
sheltered from the nearby Atlantic. Somehow I ended up without Garonne photos.
But here is the Dordogne, with some kind of white-flowered riverweed.
And the Lot, at a spot where canoe teams come to practice, and a
sailing class is out on the river today.
Visiting The Cro-Magnons
Carolina's brother Nicolas, my major host of the week, had his heart set on
showing me the Cro-Magnon cave paintings in the Dordogne valley.
Photography is not allowed in the caves, which are too dark for casual work
anyway.
We let be the famous site at Lascaux, where you can only see reproductions,
not the original paintings. Instead we visited Font de Gaum, the last site
in Europe where the public can see the actual Cro-Magnon paintings.
On final approach to the caves.
Inside were paintings of bison,
reindeer, lion,
at least one mammoth (!), painted by eyewitnesses, not reconstructed from fossils.
Agen
Between Bordeaux and Toulouse, Agen is a county seat where my cousin Colette and her
charming daughter operate a gem of a hotel, with attached laundromat.
Agen is also the prune capital of France, and probably Europe - a serious
local speciality. Tino took me to visit the Agen Prune Museum. No details here;
you had to be there.
Tino and his brother have a long-established truck service and repair business.
Their sign used to cover the length of the building, but a new tax, based on the
area of a business' sign, led to this more modest presentation.
Yrs Trly, at an outdoor cafe with Nicolas and Marie, one of whom is holding
the camera.
No report on the week would be complete without a photo of Nicolas, both singly
and with the charming Marie. Thanks to them for more than I can mention here.
And thanks as well to Tino and Martine, Tino's brother and sisters, Carolina in
Bordeaux, Colette and Laetitia in Agen, Eugene from Spain, and a teenager
named Emilie who helped brighten an evening.
Contents Copyright 2012 Jeff Bulf