Day 17 mile 508, Interviewed in Périgueux by Emilie Daubisse

July 27, Tuesday

miles today 36, total miles 523

end at St. Astier

 

Highlights:

• Coffee and croissants in Thiviers, looked for maps, got started late at 10:30

• Uphill, downhill

• Périgueux - nice town, big feel, small size. Great shops for books, internet, sidewalk cafes, fashion stores, traffic circles.

• Got interviewed by journalist

• Everything is in French, very few people speak English

• OT really helpful

• Left Périgueux tired at 4:30, must go on

• Rush hour, bad traffic

• Chancelade, rested in Abbey park - ate a whole pineapple.

• St. Astier - on the way passed by limestone caves fenced off

 

My turn to host today. We go to a cute little bar in Thiviers for our breakfast. I go inside and take a couple of croissants from the little basket at the bar and order two café au laits; someone brings them out to our table. We watch the town move about in the morning sun. This is an old hilltop town with winding, narrow streets. We do a little shopping for maps etc. It is market day and the market is on the steps of the church. There is a house for sale right next door; it is vacant. This house is not the typical village house that shares walls with its neighbors; it has a yard on all four sides and a street on three sides. The front looks at the church across the street. I wonder if it was connected with the church at some time. It is in the very center of this town. How fun it would be to live in a house like this in the middle of a town like this!

 

I was sitting on the curb on a little side street in Périgueux studying the map, waiting for Lorraine to do her emailing at the internet cafe, when a mademoiselle with a very large camera asked me if I speak French, and would I mind if she interviews me? She had to ask twice before I realized what she was saying, and then - but of course! I leap to my feet, run my fingers through my hair, brush the dust off my pants - suddenly I feel very grubby - Lorraine comes out of the café just at the right moment. We are so excited. The mademoiselle asks a few questions, takes several photos - Lorraine and I art direct the photo: how about if I stand behind her like this - or like this so we can get the bicycle in? She says ‘oui!’ and tells us we will be in the Sud-Ouest newspaper tomorrow, “look for it”, she says. We see the Sud Ouest everywhere - it covers all the local news of southwestern France. Sure we will, sure. Well, we certainly will look for ourselves tomorrow in the paper!

 

By the time we left Périgueux, it was 4:30 and rush hour, and we were tired and ready to quit for the day but we had only gone 23 miles so a part of us was saying “go on, go on!” We took the road out of town along with everyone who was driving home from work. The traffic was intense. Loud, hot, dangerous. To escape, we cut off to visit Chancelade Abbey, and we said if we found a nice place to stay for the night we would stop. The Abbey church was open; it was beautiful, small, all of white stone, and it was peacefully quiet there. It was lovely. Black wooden benches against the white stone all clean and fresh as if it had been built yesterday. A simple, long stone altar with candles in the narrow windows behind it, and the sun, getting low in the sky, shining in the doorway up the aisle almost to the altar. The candles behind the altar were lit, the church was ready for mass. We rested in the park outside the Abbey; we ate a whole pineapple. We really wanted to quit. To avoid the traffic, we decided to follow the chemin route even though it looked like it went way off into the hills. We followed it up and up and up through tiny villages, ended up very high, then went down, down, down through a thick forest on a very steep dark narrow road; we finally decided to come back to D3. Unfortunately D3 had lost its shoulder and still had heavy, speeding traffic; and a very steep uphill climb. And right here Lorraine's chain jammed in a cog and the pedals couldn’t turn. Lorraine broke down along with her bicycle. Fortunately, just yanking the chain out solved the bicycle probem. We were tired and hot, the road was very dangerous; the conditions were right there for a disaster. We hauled our bicycles to the other side of the guardrail and rested on the bank for a good half hour while Lorraine recovered, and then there was nothing else to do but get back on our bicycles and go back onto that dangerous road. Lorraine felt better and better as we went on. After this bad part, it was downhill and then along a river (that’s level) for another 13 miles to St. Astier.

 

Riding down this road was lovely; it was a yellow road on the map but it had very little traffic. It began as a nice easy descent to the river bottom, then along the river it was ever so slightly downhill allowing us to cover a lot of ground in very good time. That was encouraging. It had cooled off and the air was gentle and soft, the sun was low and cast its long light across everything. The river was on the left beyond long fields, and after a few miles there began to be large cliffs on the right side, white cliffs obscured most of the time by trees. Every now and then a patch would open out and you could see what looked like caves; as the cliffs became more prominent and the caves more numerous you could see chain link fencing blocking them off. Then what looked like a mine with a paved road leading to huge doors going into the cliff, and a stoplight. Tall industrial-looking buildings against the cliffs. At the biggest of them a large sign about gendarmes, soldiers, trainng. What is this place?

 

The light was getting low when we got into St. Astier and went over the bridge to the campground - a very pretty little falls all across the river - those buildings at the falls must have been the mill at one time. All the old buildings in town are built right up against the river. The campground is large, nice, modern, computerized. There is a big party - bbq, dancing for campers. The campground restaurant was closed because of the party (you had to have a reservation) so we went into town. One restaurant was open - it had cute little tables with bright tablecloths. A nice old man waiter. He was delighted we were there. He brought us water in a big pitcher, two stem glasses, and ice in a silver bucket with a little silver shovel. He set it all down with a flourish and a little smile as if he had just finished performing Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu on the piano. He loved to talk. He talked to the only other couple in the restaurant for 45 minutes - I thought they were friends of his, but when they left, he came over and talked to us for a long time. He told us about cepes; they are a type of mushroom similar to boletus edulus, but not the same. Also that summertime is his dead season; from September to June the restaurant is packed because of the training school down the road (!) for the pan-europe police. The students live in dorms as well as in town, and they pack his restaurant every night. His name is Patrick, his restaurant is Le Semaphore, and it is balanced on the edge of the river in the middle of the old stone town. He added party rooms upstairs this summer - he ran upstairs and turned on the lights so he could bring us up there to show us; we admired it. Lorraine’s dinner was confit de canard, mine was veal. With a nice red wine. We went all out and had dessert of peach melba - a strawberry ice cream sundae with peaches, whipped cream, cherry.

 

We left Patrick’s restaurant about 10:30. It was a good end to a hard day. We had to make the day longer to make it end a good day. The bicycle chain incident was a gentle warning: nothing bad happened, it was just a jam. If ever anything breaks or there is an injury - that’s a bad day! We must be very careful to not allow anything to happen.

Done