Up the Dordogne with a paddle

We are drawing towards the end of a wonderful few weeks in the Lot, near the Dordogne Valley, and will be very sorry to leave. This is an absolutely beautiful part of the world, dotted with a jumble of tiny stone villages, each with their own very distinctive character, church and market day. Castles and towns cling to the rugged limestone cliffs above the Dordogne, Vezere and Lot rivers and the cliffs themselves are riddled with caves and some of the earliest examples of human art.

We have walked miles here, from village to village, through forests and fields, down into marvelous cave chambers, through every station of the Cross on the way up the steep cliff to the mighty Rocamadour, an abbey on the ancient pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Unlike the pilgrims, however, we did not accomplish this on our knees!

One of our favourite afternoons was spent kayaking the Dordogne River, drifting under cliff tops and castles and soaring birds of prey. The current was running strongly in our favour with small areas of easy white water for thrills and every bend revealing some extraordinary new vista. Blissful!

We are sharing our very comfortable stone ‘farmhouse’ outside the village of Les Quatre Routes with Merle, Joe, Beth and Barbara - family friends from the far north coast of NSW. It has been nice to have others to share tales of the day and games of 500, not to mention the excellent local wine, cheese and every imaginable (and unimaginable) part of the duck’s anatomy.

The freezing winds of Brittany have become a distant memory with the temperature climbing over 30 degrees some days. Spring is now well advanced down here: the walnut orchards are in full leaf, cherries are ripening on the trees and the fields and hedgerows are a riot of wild flowers – red poppies, wild roses, buttercups, Queen Anne’s Lace. We are seeing red squirrels and molehills and a range of wonderful storybook birds – woodpeckers, robins etc – but continue our search for a hedgehog that is not squished flat on the road.

On Saturday we do the long drive to Provence, via the mighty new Millau suspension bridge. We’ll be meeting my Dad at Avignon station the following day and spending the next few weeks with him. He is already in France – in Strasbourg at the moment - and we are in daily text and phone contact.

We are managing to get the odd postcard off to people but we are a bit slack on that front, we know. We buy them but with our days so full and with journals, photo filing, blogs, school work and French lessons to get done, we struggle to get them written.

We all send our love. We continue to enjoy your news and messages from home.