French Peloton leg workout

I spent quite a long time trying to figure out this bathroom sign and I got nowhere but I’m open to your interpretations. This was the sign for a single entry/single sink area bathroom. Next to the sink, there was a single stall for women and then, in a cubby area off to the left and totally visible to everyone washing their hands, a urinal. And it’s confusing because, to me, it looks like the sign is designating a bathroom for women and peeping Toms when, in reality, it was the women who were provided the peeping, welcome or not.

And I’m sorry to do this to you but I worry that my last post was overly-focused on the bucolic at the expense of some of the travel issues we face. So I briefly want to bring up an issue with French food and perhaps the entirety of French culture, which is that, if you are a vegetarian, they will assume you want an omelette served to you at each and every meal even though many other food groups are in existence here in France. I have been served at least 6 omelettes in the past few days. Here’s my lunch omelette today and there’s a dinner omelette on the agenda for me in an hour or so, although the wondrous Tom is trying to intervene.

But on to our touring. We started our day with a hearty climb up the steep side of Rocamadour, a little village that has been the site of pilgrimages since the 12th century. Tom, in what I feel was a glaring and devious tour guide factual omission about what the latter part of our day would include, seemed jovially approving of our decision to walk the 216 steps up to level 2 of the village, then along the upward path through the 14 stations of the cross, and finally up and down dozens of stairs in the castle. From the pic below, you can see our start at the bottom and then our finish at the castle at the very top. Actual pilgrims do the route on their knees.

Above is me, outside the the cathedral Norte Dame, halfway to the top of our climb and below is Ron, early in the day, before the French touristing life took the spring out of his step.

Having finished our pilgrimage, we headed out to Padirac Gouffre, which is a large cave that’s been here since at least 300AD. Now that I have looked it up, I can tell you that the entrance to the cave is 338 feet below the ground level and, if you want and if your tour guide is not terribly specific about how steep, long and wet the climb is, you can take the stairs instead of the civilized three elevator series.

Here’s the view looking up from just the first section. You then enter the underground area, where the stairs are soaking wet and water drip drip drips on your head and you’re probably just like me, thinking about your spectacular fall a couple years back, where you broke all those bones.

But it’s worth it because you end up here, in the magical netherworld, once again feeling like you’re walking through an elaborate Disney set.

All told, we did the equivalent of 44 sets of stairs to see Padirac Goufree and although my legs felt like I had just done the Stadium High School steps, I was gloriously happy with that field trip.

We finished the day off with a random sighting of some really rare Alpine A110s – a recent rebirth of a legendarily cool car! I’ll talk to you all in a couple of days – we’re moving to our last tour city – Toulouse. Tomorrow we stop and have lunch with Tom’s whole family – including his teenagers sons and in-laws – in the small city of Albi – these Road Scholar tours are esoteric for sure!