Our next day brought us to a life's dream of Ryans. When my mom invited us along on this trip, Ryan and I were talking about what we might get to visit, and he said "on my life's list of things to see and do is to visit the caves of Lascaux".
In mentioning this to my mom, it turns out the cave was but a 20 minute drive from our village. it couldn't get better! But oh it could.
If you know anything about Lascaux, you can no longer go into the real caves (which is an interesting story, but that we will save for the dinner table), and so they have built an exact replica of these prehistoric caves. Which is amazing, but still not the real thing.
Turns out my mom had something up her sleeve. She had learned about the last cave open to the public that has drawings from prehistoric man. Font de Gaume. WOW is all we can say. Below is the link to the website and a picture (from the web) we copied in to give an idea of what we saw. It is immensely controlled as the drawings (of buffalo, mammoths, horses..) found in many surrounding caves have been ruined because of graffiti, humidity, CO2. small groups of 8 are allowed in with an archaeologist for 45 minutes, no cameras, no touching the walls, it was incredible, we were looking at and learning about interpretations of what happened thousands of years ago.
Afterwards Meg took us to Les Eyzies where we enjoyed a delightful lunch, an afternoon at the musee de prehistoire, another troglodytic cave, and a quick jaunt up to lascaux II.
Enjoy and be sure to check out the website.
http://www.hominides.com/html/lieux/grotte-font-de-gaume.htm
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