Today we visited Minerve, a small village in Southern French. It sits along a river and once was a fortress. They eventually lost, but you can still see the walls that protected the city. It is a small place, and it was very pretty. We stopped and had lunch there, and the food was good, although it took Cyndie’s help to order the meals. One thing we quickly noticed is how much it cost to eat out in France. Buying food at a grocery store is significantly less than eating out. Oh well, it is a vacation, so time to splurge.
After visiting Minerve, we started driving towards some caves. We drove by the Dolmen Des Fados, and Amy immediately spoke up. She wanted to stop, so we did. It is really quite interesting. Throughout Europe there are these rock burial sites that really don’t make any sense. Why would anyone put such an effort to bury someone, especially 5000 years ago. But they did, and I guess scientist have been trying to figure out their purpose and their role in civilization ever since.
We finally made it to the Grotto, or what I’d call the French version of Calsbad Caverns. It is actually a lot smaller than Calsbad, but it is pretty impressive. I did have to crank up the ISO on my camera, but some of the pictures came out fine. Our tour guide was a young French man that didn’t speak a word of English. Even though the tour was in French he was articulate enough for us to get the idea. If you have ever toured a cavern before, you’d do fine on the tour. It was funny though, he’d stare right at you talking as if he was waiting for you to ask a question when he knew you didn’t understand a word that he was saying. It was a bit unnerving.
After all that fun and excitement, we headed back to the B&B to relax. Since this was our Anniversary, we headed out to a fancy French restaurant nearby. Thank goodness that some of the other patrons spoke English. It was a good meal and included some yummy cheese and desserts. Finally we headed back to bed so we could wake up again and explore some more.