Frqnce Dqy 1&2 Ze qre here sqfe: April 2, 2009

Dad & I hqve qrrived safe in France. Here comes my dream vacation! Just Larry and me and a rental car running around Europe!
This keyboqrd is qll different; I think Ill just go for it1 because it takes twice as long to fix everything.
Ze flez from SLC to Houston qnd then to Paris: ze hqd 2 hours in Paris and it was not enough but we made it.
The man just showed me how to change the keyboard to qwerty so it's like normal. The secret is Alt+shift. Great! (Later note: the same trick never worked again.)
When we landed in Paris, lots of busses picked us up at our plane and drove us clear around the end of the runways over to the terminal. Then we waited in line with 1000 other folks to show our passports at customs. Then we asked lots of people questions about where to go to catch our next flight to Toulouse, and walked quickly a long, long way to go thru security again. and finally found the gate. We got our seats switched together, and they were already boarding. They put us on another bus to take us out to our plane. The bus drove us a long way around the ends of the runway and across runways, and to our next plane. It was EXACTLY BESIDE the plane we just got off from Houston!
Short flight to Touslouse, no problem with getting rental car, right in the airport.
We brought my new GPS from home, and we are SO GLAD we did!
Our first 3 nights are in the boonies west of Sarlat, which is north of Toulouse a couple of hours. We started off fine on the toll autobahn going north (punctuation did not all switch correctly to qwerty) but did not notice we missed a major split in the autobahn when we had to get off to pay a toll. "Recalculating" is what the GPS voice says. We had no idea why it took us over the little tiny one-lane roads and back roads, up through the woods and tiny villages and farmlands forever until we finally arrived just right at our hotel in a one-street town called Les Eyzies. Took 2 hours longer than it should have, but the drive was beautiful. I knew something was wrong, but once I bought a map and figured out where we were, I was fine!
We love our hotel! It's http://www.fermedetayac.com/
Go see. It was originally part of the monastery for the church next door, which was built in 1120. The birds really do sing all the time, just like on the website. It's owned by British expats, and Larry and I are the only ones here right now. The season really starts at Easter. You ladies would love the decoration. It's antiques and shabby chic mixed with crazy stuff like sticks of an old tree with christmas lights and a mannequin wearing a garter and a hat. We have the whole gathering room to ourselves, complete with fireplace and comfy couches.
The lady lights a candle for us every morning at breakfast, and comes to see if we need anything each time we come in. It's been foggy, so last night we sat by the fire and read. Our room is pretty cold, but she gave me an electric heating pad to sleep on, and we are under a thick feather comforter and a quilt, so we sleep warm.
This computer does not like that I switched it to qwerty. It underlines every word red as if they were all misspelled!
This area is the seat of prehistoric everything. In fact, Cro - Magnon man was dug up about 500 yards from our hotel. We went to see the place this morning. Monsieur Magnon owned the Magnon Hotel, and he dug up the skeleton around back. Cro - magnon means Magnon's Hole, and like everything else in rural France, it's still here.
Yesterday we went to see prehistoric cave paintings. You have probably heard of Lascaux, where there are 15,000 year old paintings of horses and bison (buffalo) and reindeer. There are even paintings of woolly mammoths, which have since gone extinct. At the time these were painted, the last ice age was approaching, and this area had a climate like present-day Sweden. Well anyway, the CO2 in the breath of all the visitors interacted with the calcium in the cave walls, and made a glaze that was covering the cave paintings, so in 1968 they closed the caves to the public. The French government built a copy cave 200 yards downhill from the original, correct to within one centimeter in every detail. They paid an artist to copy the paintings on the original cave onto the copy cave. Took them 20 years and a fortune to do it. but it's really cool. Those people were homo sapiens sapiens, just like us. His statue overlooks the valley from the spot where he used to live, but it doesn't do him justice! That's Larry sitting under the overhang.
First, yesterday we visited another cave with real 16000 year old paintings on the walls. It's the last one open to the public where you can see the actual prehistoric paintings. This one is a real cave (not a copy) and I thought is was SO COOL! There are caves all over this whole area. It's limestone, but the caves were not created by water. They were created by the upthrust when the Pyrenees were made.
On the way home we were traveling down tiny little rural roads, and saw a sign for Chateau Cammarque. We decided to go see. What an adventure! Following signs for miles and miles through the woods and fields, we finally got to a parking area where we'd have to walk another kilometer to the chateau. We didn't really know if it would be worth it, and Dad's knees hurt and I was dizzy from jet lag and we didn't want to walk. So I made Dad drive down a Do Not Enter "sauf riverains" whatever that means! We drove another kilometer into the woods, and finally got to the end. Dad wouldn't get out of the car because we obviously weren't supposed to park there, so I got out to go look and immediately made him come see. It was a HUGE old ruin of a castle, built up on a rock outcropping, and it was so cool!
On the way home, we just kept following signs back toward home, we thought, but finally realized we were really lost. So we got out the trusty GPS and hooked it up. It said "Awaiting better accuracy." Oh heck, wasn't it even going to work here? Don't they have any satellites above the Dordogne? Larry said the GPS was really saying "I'm trying to find out where you idiots are!" We laughed until our sides hurt. Anyway, after a few minutes it kicked in, and started talking to us. It said we were only 7 K from Les Eyzies (how could that be possible?) and it took us down roads we thought were private driveways and in 20 minutes we were home! The GPS wins again! That little gadget has taken all the worry out of finding your way around the back roads of France!
This morning I am in Lonely Planet internet place in Sarlat, waiting for the sun to come out so Larry and I can take a canoe trip down the Dordogne river. I'll tell you later how that comes out.