Sunday 3rd – Tuesday 12th
July Madame Murat's and a boat trip up The Lot, France
Argghhhh……after
a 9am Sunday morning escape out of Paris, past Versailles and onto the A11 and
A10 along with 2 million other Parisians, we headed south on the second day of
the long Summer holidays here. All fuel
stations had no parking spaces left, the rest stops were full, so we just had
to keep on going. The campsite we booked
is near Cahors and on the Lot river….very relaxing, kids on holidays everywhere
and it has a bar, restaurant, swimming pool and evening discos for the kidlets
around here! When the Abba music
started, we decided to retire (again).
The
week has been spent in the valleys of the Lot and Dordogne in the Midi-Pyrenees
region. Both rivers are famous in France
for their scenic river valleys and impressive cliffs, villages built on rock
faces, red wine, truffles, walnut oil, pate de foie gras, canoeing, boating,
and medieval architecture.
Marion
& Brenton joined us for the week, so off we chuffed for a ploughman’s lunch
at Madame Murat’s…..talk about an ordinary restaurant in an ordinary village
made famous by the writing of a single book about Mme Murat and her gastronomic
delights. M & B have dined there before, so we looked forward to a luncheon
of soup, home baked bread, canard (duck), local cheeses followed by a
magnificent crème brulee! We all tried
to sneak a photo of one of the guests…Mary Moody from “ABC Gardening” fame who
has a little “vacance” rental in a nearby village. Well spotted Marion….talk
about spot the Aussie!
The
next day we self-boated along the Lot River, negotiating locks like true
veterans at first following two other hire boats but we gladly went past them
after their panic in a Lock when the incoming water swamped their boat! The
dolomite cliffs rise high above the river, and Jim excitedly described the upward
thrusting tens of millions of years ago of the tectonic plates and the rock
once being coral reefs and now sedimentary, dolomite or basalt like. Gee to us it was more like a mixture of
layers with a dash of balsamic! Our
picnic lunch we’d put together was sumptuous even by French standards, and it
was great to see the villages from a different and slower perspective.
