Thursday April 26, 2018 posting
April 14 & 15 Lascaux & Font de Gaume
Lascaux cave is located near the town of Montignac in
southeast France. There are no major
highways to this place, so we were driving through small town after small
town. We stayed at a B&B a couple
hundred meters from the original Lascaux cave.
Three replicas of the original cave have been made. The first Lascaux II is 39m long, and it is
still open for visits. Lascaux III is a
travelling exhibition, and we saw it at the Chicago Museum of Natural History
in 2013. Lascaux IV opened in 2016. It models 90% of the actual cave. We arrived in Montignac on Saturday
afternoon. We found a church in the area
that had a Saturday mass. We then had a
wonderful dinner at the B&B.
I had reserved tickets for the 16:00 English tour of Lascaux
IV, so we had some time to fill. We
visited the town of Sarlat that was about a half hour from Montignac. The old town is a very nice tourist area,
shops, cafes a church and a few other interesting buildings. We happened to watch a Fire-Rescue team
practice a drill repelling down the wall behind the church. We then headed for Les Eyzies de Tayac
Sireuil where the Font de Gaume is located.
We weren’t on dirt roads, but maybe one or two steps up. We visited the Musee National de Prehistoire before our tour
started. It is a study center museum
that has a very small museum. The
displays are very informative, there just aren’t many of them. Then we went back to the cave to start our
tour.
All of the research emphasizes the need to
book early and be there early. They
allow pre-booking of 26 tickets per day, and then sell 52 tickets on the day of
the tour. You don’t pay for tickets
until you arrive, so I imagine that more than a few people reserve tickets that
do not show up. The tour size is limited
to a total of less than 80 total per day.
There were 12 people there for our English tour, and only three of us
were native English speakers, so it became a French/English tour. The guide talked more in French than English,
but that is the way it goes. It was
really neat to see these 15,000 year old paintings, I know this wouldn’t be for
everybody, but we enjoyed it. Then it
was back to our B&B for another great dinner.
One concern we had about leaving Monday morning was finding
where we could buy gas. In small towns
most of the stations are unmanned.
Everyone pays by credit card, but most US cards don’t work at these
kiosks. Buying gas on the motorways is
not a problem, because they are just like our toll road plazas. But our B&B host told us that one station
at the local supermarket has an attendant from 9-12AM. Tomorrow we will be off to stay at our Home
Exchange in Le Mans with a stop along the way to see a 12th century
church that has a 1001 painting.
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