Oct 19--Rome and Home

Oct 19 -- Rome
The hotel, Domus Caesari, was  within 4km of the Campacino airport yet it was still 35 euros to get here last night. And it's 70 euros, or about $100 to get to Fiumincino airport tomorrow AM. It's difficult to outsmart the Romans.
 The hotel is spacious and quiet, in the hills above Rome, a fountain in the courtyard and olive and cypress trees on the  approach. I wasn't sure if I wanted to deal with Rome again but after walking the neighborhood and seeing a ghastly amount of trash along the road, plastic bags, bottles, paper, and cigarettes and not a store or a restaurant, I decided to brave the train downtown.
 Rick Steve's guide identified the National Museum as one of the places one should visit in Rome. I missed it last time and it is near the main train station. I got on the train about a km from the hotel, memorizing my stop--Pattenella. In about a half an hour I was downtown and I checked the schedule for return trips, about one per hour and walked about 500 meters between a dozen tracks and 29 separate landings, hoping I would find my way back.
The museum did have the best of the statues, frescos, and mosaics recovered in excavations of ancient Rome. The rented audio guide was informative and interesting  especially about the scarred and bloody bronze boxer and the different hair-styles on the marble busts that dated them. The famous discus-thrower is there.
After, I bought a cappuccino, a pistachio gelato and walked around the neighborhood adjoining the train station. Lots of hotels, Americans, overpriced shops, and expensive restaurants.  I probably should have stayed at a convenient location near the station so that I could have taken the 15 euro subway to the airport but the area was not very appealing.
I'm ready for a vacation from museums. I guess I'm ready to go home.

Oct 18 Barcelona

Oct 18 Barcelona
Barcelona seems twice as big as it was, when I last visited, 15 years ago. Parc Guell was crazy! There was only parking for buses. When we asked were to park a cop pointed downtown. So the seven of us girls got out and the dads went to look for 2 parking spaces. After lunch we found Gaudi's giant tile lizard and the undulating tile walls. Amazing how beautiful all the 120 year-old tile work is.
Pupeteers, steel drum players, jugglers, and guitarists played and performed.
 A dozen salespeople had tablecloths covered with scarves, jewelry, and glass pendants in the pillared area under the soccer park. Taya and Clara bought glass geckos that they promised to carefully carry as we climbed up to the top level.
At the top, Another couple of dozen youths sat, selling behind their cloths covered with trinkets. We sprawled on the snaking tile bench overlooking downtown Barcelona and the Mediterranean sea.
Sven likes to get jumping pictures and the bench was only about 18 inches off the ground so the kids stood on it and...."one, two, three...." Taya leaped forward falling on the sandy surface, her glass gecko flew out of her hands dismembering itself on the ground. No sooner than when Vicky had picked up the crying six-year-old, then the three-year-old, Clara fell off the bench breaking her gecko and skinning her knees. As we comforted the crying kids, Sven picked up glass pieces and promised to use super glue to fix them. Kids were rubbing on disinfectant and Balika was offering spongebob bandaids when a police car appeared across the field from us and all the marketers folded up their wares in their tablecloths,slung them over their shoulders, and ran the other way, laughing like it was a show they put on every day.
Balika said, "just like at the Eiffel tower--it's against the law to sell souvenirs there and every couple of hours the police come by and the hawkers all run."
Vicky and Bobby went to visit her childhood nanny and the Haakanson's drove me to the airport where we got snacks and Eilidh drew me a picture of the three of us in the back seat of the Renault and Bella drew a castle, a monkey-puzzle tree and the entrance and the exit to a secret place. I cried in the terminal. I will miss them terribly.

oct 17--Coullioure

oct 17-- Coullioure
Vicky and Bobby (Sven's best friend from Harvard) and their two girls, six and four, slept in late after traveling from San Francisco to Paris and an all-day train ride to the coast.
At 11:00 the nine of us tromped down to the market and vicky bought some of her favorite foods from when she lived in France--cheese-- mantego and mimolette; sausages--Catalan, olive, fig, Serrano, chili; and bread--whole grain and walnut. I bought two kilos of oysters. Bobby bought some of the local wine. I watched the rowing ten-man, boat races from the beach, out around a buoy 200 yards offshore and back in a thirty knot wind. Parker clad spectators cheered them on.

Back at the house, we snacked on our goodies, turned up the heat in the pool, and the kids played around in it despite the fifty-five degree weather and the persistent wind. I found some lemons on a tree and white grapes on a vine in the backyard.

While the kids warmed up in the bathtub, we poured over guidebooks as everyone wanted to go to Barcelona! Vicky was so nice; she thanked me for getting stuck so they had to an excuse to go to one of their favorite cities. So, the plan is to drive two hours to Barcelona, go to the Gaudi park in the morning and the Rambla in the afternoon before they drop me off at the airport. Whohoo! The French strike just bought me three more days with my grandkids and a bonus trip to Barcelona! That more than makes up for the two hotel rooms that charged me the full room rate in spite of my cancellation.

oct 16 Toulouse and French strike

Oct 16 Toulouse?
As we packed up to leave our gite (weekly rentals  France, gite.com ), I received an email from easy jet. My flight from Toulouse to Rome had been cancelled because of the French strike. Transportation was completely disrupted. We spent an hour chasing alternatives, none of which resolved my problem of traveling from France to Italy. We decided to try to book a train from the Toulouse station.
Balika and I stood in line for more than an hour to find out that we were in the France-only line and the other line was 2x as long and many of the trains had been canceled.  So we went to my hotel to use the Internet to look into the options. 
Meanwhile Vicky and Bobby, who would be sharing the next gite with B & S, called and they didn't know it they could get out of Paris due to the strike.  We finally found a flight from Barcelona to Rome on the 18th. So, after letting the kids jump on the hotel bed, to my great relief, I was able to cancel the next two nights at the Ours Blanc (polar bear) and i continued with the family to Couliou, on the coast at the Spanish border.  Toulouse seemed big, noisy, and scary and it has 120,000 college students who seemed to all be trying to get on trains. I was relieved to leave it. 
I was asleep in the third bed in Eilidh and Bella's room by 10:00 when Sven left to get Bobby, Vicky, and their two daughters at a nearby train station.

oct 15, Last day in Dordogne

the cemetery down the road from our gite

The graveyard that looked like a garden center

Sven Haakanson's fish-eye lens--cool!

Last day in Dordogne, we drove to a village that duplicated one from 1900 but decided that it was too expensive and too cold to enjoy so we continued onto lunch and lineuil, where the Vezere and the Dordogne rivers meet.

We threw bread scraps at some uninterested swans then climbed up more winding alleys lined with potted flowers into a ghost-town of shuttered houses.
Faced with the choice of finding another cave for which the reviews were mediocre or a garden near our cottage, we chose the latter and were pleased with our decision. The Eyrignac Manor Gardens, 3 stars on the Michelin guide, has won many awards and has been advertised as the nicest garden in Perigon. It has English, French, and Italian elements with good bi-lingual explanations for why the English trim their boxwood and yew in a somewhat less precise manner than the French, who like to see the exact contours of the rounds, squares, and cones of the boxwood from the ground floor of their manners.

Also, most of the trees at the manor and gardin were labeled which catered to my obsession with naming plants--yew, blue cedar, cypress, tulip tree,hornbeams, walnut, mulberry, acacia, and sweetgum. 

Throughout the garden was a temporary exhibit of the work of Dietrich Klinge consisting of two dozen or so  sculptures that appeared to be made of wood. They had been created from wood carvings and then cast in bronze. The bark of the trees gave texture to the primitive expressionistic figures.

A small chapel with three seats graced the courtyard. Eilidh, Bella and I sat in the chapel and when their mom and dad got their we told them, "sorry, the church is full."

at home, Sven and Balika packed while the kids and I had acorn wars  on the trampoline, got ourselves dizzy twirling on the swing, and had spitting contests with grape seeds.

Oct 13---Lascaux ll

Lascaux--

It was market day in Sarlat so we got an early start and parked near "goose square." There we took pictures of the kids hugging the statues of the portly, enlarged-liver, bronze geese. I was on a mission to buy cans of goose liver to bring home so going through the mid-evil road, I sampled goose and duck liver at a dozen booths then tried the samples of herbed goat cheese, walnut tarts, and jams. I returned to the booth at which the producer had won a bronze star in Paris and it was slightly cheaper than that of the booth that seemed to be catering to most of the American tourists.  I bought 3 cans of goose pate and 3 of duck.
Foie=liver
Gras=rich or oily
D'oie= of goose
De canard= of duck

The last booth at the market was fortuitously that of a local wine dealer and after all that foie gras I was thirsty so, even though it was only 10:30 AM, I sampled his vin rouge and his vin rose, settled on a bottle of the rose for 4.5 euros (about $6.00), to take back to the cottage.
We continued on to a children's museum and animal park where the extinct large black bulls depicted in the caves have been reproduced by reverse cross breading of modern animals.
As we walked the empty park through the pens of donkeys, goats, european deer and cows, we stumbled on a life-size, realistic wholly mammoth. A great photo-op as Eilidh posed next to it.

After lunch we had scheduled a tour through Lascaux ll. My expectations were low for this tour because it was a mock-up of the most famous of caves--lascaux. The cave had been discovered by two teenagers in 1942 when their dog fell into a hole. They returned the next day and dug into the cavern and discovered a complex of caves covered with almost 2000 images. In the twelve years that the caves were open to the public, a million people toured the caves until the paintings began to deteriorate from the carbon dioxide. The cave was closed to the public and a 15year project started in which replicas of the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery were built-- artists used prehistoric tools and methods to duplicate the paintings To see more about caves...link to... .http://www.thisfrenchlife.com/thisfrenchlife/2009/07/virtual-lascaux-caves.html

One of the horses, reproduced in the gift shop.

It was truly stunning to stand inside a room where 17,000 year-old animals seemed to swirl around us. Pictures of the art cannot duplicate the feeling of standing next to a 17 foot bull surrounded by herds of horses and deer. A couple of twe.lve foot bulls charge through the cave, a bear stalks from below, and horses manes flow as they run. In the cool, dark cave, one can almost hear the galloping of the ancient hooves. It's like being in the middle of a stampede.