The Lot Valley

This morning we left Meyreuis under cloudy skies (what is this wet stuff?? we haven't seen rain for weeks!) but the sun soon won over and we took the road through the Gorges de Gargilan on our way to the Lot Valley. One of the benefits of the cooler weather as we are a little farther North is that we are getting an instant replay of some of the lovely flowers that I have been enjoying this past month in Provence. There the roses and poppies are really over but here they are still in full bloom and I will never have enough of of either of these two lovely flowers. This is an area of France that we saw briefly when Dean and Kathy were here but it is one area that I really enjoyed and even after today I feel that I would love to come back to explore further here. We drove from along the river to the picture perfect village of Estaing, which nestles beneath its  massive chateau on the riverbank. We had a picnic lunch by the 13th century stone bridge that crosses the river and felt that we could not imagine a more perfect setting. Truly the highlight of the day! 

From here we drove to Conques, one of the most important sites in France. (It should come with a warning that "you can't get there from here" as it is so deep in the countryside that it took an hour to get there and an hour to get out and while extraordinary, we were not sure that it was worth the trip. Again it is a picture perfect village with cobblestone streets lined with half-timbered cottages that seem to lean precariously inwards but the centre of the village is a massive church and abbey , part of which dates back to the 9th century. Here the treasury holds the most important collection of medieval gold and Renaissance gold work in western Europe. The place was swamped with school and tour groups and we were content to look at the highlights displayed in the postcards and move on. In oder to enter the town we had to purchase an annual pass which is affixed to the window of the car, a clever marketing tool when there is no way that most of the people who go there would ever find it again in a lifetime much less a year.

The church in Conques

 By the time we made it to the autoroute we were actually happy to pay our money and make some much needed progress up north. Sadly we had to hurry past Limoges, famous for china, and Aubusson, known for its rugs to the little place that we had chosen to stay the night. I was sad anyway, Gord is not really interested in china except as a place to put his food or rugs except as something to wipe his feet on and he had done more than enough driving for one day.