Rebecca & Marie followed by Tom, canoeing on the Dordogne

Tom with my wheelchair, canoeing on the Dordogne

Me steering from behind, canoeing on the Dordogne

After lunch in La Roque Gageac; note empty ice cream glasses

La Roque Gageac

We pulled in at La Roque Gageac, yet another of les plus beaux villages de France. It was clearly a big tourist attraction.

We had lunch at a restaurant on the main street—it had a covered patio with tables across the street on the riverbank side. Our waiter was every inch the professional French waiter: middle-aged, slim, dark, constantly darting back and forth across the street to the restaurant. You knew that if he’d seen one tourist, he’d seen a million, yet he managed to keep from rolling his eyes at us.

The menu had a wide selection of interesting ice cream flavors. I urged Claudia to order dessert, but she looked doubtful. “It’s the cream,” she said. “I don’t want whipped cream out of a can.” When the waiter returned to take our dessert orders, she said, “Votre chantilly…?”

He responded immediately, punctuating each word with a stab of his pen. “De la maison, Madame! De la maison!”

“Bon,” Claudia responded, and ordered ice cream with whipped cream. She turned back to me, relieved. “Hausgemacht,” she murmured, “Good”.

“He knew what you were worried about,” I pointed out.

“Good thing, too—I didn’t know what I was going to say next!”

After lunch it was back on the bike, heading toward the Château de Beynac. The route was up, up, and more up. Marie was with me, and Enrico was driving the van; at some point he phoned to report, thrilled, that he’d found an accessible (pay) toilet, so we met him there and used it (yea! Enrico, I owe you 50 cents). More up, up, up, with the castle somehow always in view but always further away. Enrico phoned again to confirm that the castle was utterly inaccessible, so instead of continuing up, we turned off and biked back to Sarlat.

Overall, I was sorry not to have seen Beynac, or to have been able to sightsee in La Roque Gageac. But I enjoyed the canoeing tremendously, and was glad that my ancient Girl Scout canoeing skills seemed to have survived the decades.

Moulin de la Tour

So everyone rode off and I got in the van and we drove to Moulin de la Tour, a 16th century walnut mill on the Enéa River. The mill is water powered, the grindstones are granite, the nut paste is heated in a cast iron cauldron over a wood fire, and pressed through canvas cloth to obtain the oil.

The granite grindstone, reducing the walnut meat to a paste

Heating the walnut paste

Pressing out the oil

One thing we noticed about the mill was how low the ceilings were. In addition, the drive system (pulleys and belts from the water wheel to the various mechanisms) was hung from the ceiling, reducing head room even more. Everyone who worked there seemed to be very short, but a taller inattentive visitor would be in danger of being scalped!

Les Jardins du Manoir d’Eyrignac

We also stopped at the gardens of Eyrignac, an homage to the art of topiary (or, as our fellow rider Rebecca said, “Very organized bushes”). Only a very small portion of the gardens could be reached by wheelchair, and that involved pushing over crushed gravel paths, so despite the reduced entrance price, for me it wasn’t really worth the effort.

La Ferme des Campagnes

La Ferme des Campagnes is a duck farm near Rocamadour. Here ducks are raised for 3 months and then force fed for 12 days prior to slaughter. They become foie gras, confit de canard, cassoulet and more. We observed the gavage (force feeding) and a video about the business. The farm (heavily dependent on tourists) was very accessible.

We also stopped in Souillac, where the able-bodied riders took a look at the cathedral (a sculptural and stained glass homage to St. Martin of Tours, as far as I could tell from the little flyer about it) and the Musée de l’Automate, a museum devoted to mechanical toys.

The bulk of the ride was along the Dordogne River. It was lovely—a nice wide road, very little vehicle traffic, shaded with large trees and cooled by river breezes. It was a cool and misty day anyway, and I was very comfortable (although I was informed by my husband that I was the only one who was happy that it wasn’t hotter). We turned away from the river shortly after passing through Veyrignac and went north on a rails-to-trails bike path for about 12 kilometers. Here the going was a little tougher; it was starting to rain, and the (paved) trail had a pronounced cross slope.

When we reached the end of the trail at the outskirts of Sarlat, I was wet and crabby. Tour leaders Enrico and Gwendal were waiting for me with the van, and offered to give me a lift the rest of the way, but some sort of stubborn pride had kicked in, and I declined. It was rush hour, and traffic was heavy, but my escorts (my husband and Enrico) just flanked me and we forced our way in through the cars. Some more uphills, some crazy downhills, a couple of traffic circles, and we were there. Another bike tour group was unloading at the hotel, and I got a little applause as I rolled into the courtyard.

The big event for the Thursday was visiting the giant cave of Padirac. There are very few pictures, I’m afraid, as photography isn’t permitted in the cavern.

The Legend

The Devil and Saint Martin
The devil formed the Gouffre with the kick of his heel to challenge Saint Martin. If the saint were able to cross the abyss, Lucifer would give him all of the souls of the damned peasants he was about to drive straight to hell.

So Saint Martin, driven by his faith, spurred his mule. With a tremendous leap, the animal reached the other side of the crater, leaving an imprint of his hooves in the rock that is still discernable today.

Defeated and angry, the devil immediately disappeared to the bottom of the Gouffre…

The Visit

I had studied the website pretty carefully and was fairly convinced that it was not going to be accessible to me, and I was reconciled to that. So I was surprised when Marie announced that we were going to have a special tour. Our first view of the visitors building was not very encouraging, and in fact, there were no physical or architectural accommodations for access whatsoever. What there was were three strong young men.

Marie went inside to pay for our tickets, and promptly came bouncing back out to ask me for proof of disability. I handed her my handicapped parking permit which apparently did the trick. She came back with the three strong young men (hereafter 3SYM), and they escorted us around to the back of the building where there were still steps, but not as many. The 3SYM picked me up, chair and all, and lifted me up to the level where the restrooms (so not accessible!) were, kindly inquiring if I needed to use them before we got going. Then down several steps into the visitor center, and to the first elevator.

This elevator took us down 99 meters into the chasm, and I naively assumed that at this point we were done with elevation changes. Not so! I didn’t keep good track of all the staircases we descended/ascended, but trust me when I say there were a lot of them. Luckily there were very few visitors the morning of our visit. This enabled the 3SYM to carry me up and down narrow, dark, wet, concrete stairs without having to shoo hundreds of other tourists out of the way first.

Eventually we arrived at an underground boat jetty, where we bypassed the fairly long line of waiting tourists and got into a boat (yes, wheelchair and all). While reviews of the caverns in English frequently emphasize the lack of English-speading guides, one of the 3SYM spoke excellent English and provided the commentary. The boat ride was 0.5km of serene crystal clear underground river. The lighting is very subdued, the vault of the ceiling far above our heads. At points it was raining; our guide explained that the rain is a constant feature no matter what the weather above ground. At the other end we disembarked and walked (rolled, were carried) through more amazing caverns and to more underground lakes and waterfalls. At the Lac Supérieur the able-bodied visitors climb higher and wind up back at the boat dock; we turned around and retraced our steps.

The official website has a nifty, interactive, (inaccessible, slow) Flash tour; it’s pretty impressive.

I asked the 3SYM how often they were called on for wheelchair-carrying duty; they guesstimated a couple of times a month. I asked if the management had any rules and regulations about who they would or would not allow in and carry; they didn’t know. So this access seems to be undocumented and at the discretion of the management (the 3SYM declined to answer questions about the ownership of the caverns; that’s apparently a sensitive subject). I have a hard time imagining that a tourist attraction in the US would do what the 3SYM did.

Oh, the toilets! The 3SYM lifted me up the one step into the ladies room, and then blocked the door; Claudia helped me in and out of the narrow stall (although the toilet paper roll holder was a casualty when I tried to use it as a grab bar).

La Ferme de Gernes

On the first day’s ride, we had a stop arranged at La Ferme de Gernes owned by farmer and baker Daniel Chastaing. M. Chastaing had some refreshments laid out for us, including bread and soft cheese of his own production; preserves (quince and something else), and tea and coffee. We saw the bakery, including wood oven and proofing baskets.

Notice the chalk marks telling the bikers to stop (!) for bread

L-R: Marie (tour leader), M. Chastaing (prop), Rebecca, Katja, John, Claudia

Wood burning oven, table with proofing baskets

Beautiful finished loaves

Collonges-la-Rouge

Our lunch stop was at Collonges-la-Rouge, 8th century priory town, one of the plus beaux villages de France (“most beautiful villages of France”—this is an official designation). Marie was worried that I wasn’t taking enough pictures, so after lunch she took my camera and dashed around getting some of the loveliest buildings.

L-R: John, Katja, Claudia. Claudia has two bikes because Allen is pulling the handcycle.

Our lunch spot. Duck. Lots of duck.

After we had eaten, the proprietor, while clearing our dishes, pointed at each plate and pronounced, "Good! Good! Bad!" depending on whether food had been left uneaten. L-R: John, Katja, Claudia, Allen (at last!), Gwendal (tour leader).

Note the scallop icon of St James (St Jacques, Santiago). Collonges-la-Rouge is on the pilgrim route to Compostela.

Obligatory accessibility notes: Collonges-la-Rouge has some very steep and narrow streets, but it is very much a tourist town, and help is readily available. There are accessible toilets in the square near the church.

More to come…

I may have also mentioned that complicating things was the fact that Monday, the day before our departure, was a holiday in France. Among other things, this forced us to rent a car on Saturday that we didn’t need until Monday.

I tried to arrange shipping in advance, but discovered that FedEx doesn’t work that way. “Call the day before,” the FedEx International Freight coordinator in the US said airily. “The day before is a holiday in France,” I said. “Should I call the day before that? Will anyone speak English? Will they know what customs forms I need to fill out?”

The tour coordinator rescued me briefly from my panic by telling me that the hotel was very helpful, and he was sure it would all work out. Fast forward to Monday morning. The tour leaders all had to leave by 9:00 am. At the hotel, probably because it was a holiday, no one was working who spoke English, and my French wasn’t up to dealing with FedEx. Which didn’t matter, because FedEx was closed. So I started trying to schedule the shipment online, and Allen worked on figuring out customs forms.

Several hours later, after many online dead ends (“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”), we had managed to establish that a shipper with a US address cannot, in fact, schedule a shipment from France to the United States. While I tried not to melt down, and my husband doggedly took apart the handcycle, our dear friends offered to drive with us to Toulouse (a 4 hour round trip for them) with some of the stuff in their car.

Eventually we all agreed that this was the only way. We packed our bags, checked out, and set about putting stuff in the cars. My husband had gotten the handcycle box into our little Renault Modus, but was certain the wheelchair would not fit in as well. But Allen and Claudia—Claudia in particular—looked at our car with the bike box, wheel bag, and our two bags in it, and exclaimed, “Look how much more room there is in here!” I went and sat in my seat and refrained from offering helpful advice, and Allen and Claudia poked at things and moved them around a bit, and lo! everything fit. My husband was flabbergasted. Claudia helpfully added, “And you still have enough room for a hitchhiker!”

So I didn’t have to ship the bike, and Allen and Claudia didn’t have to drive to Toulouse. All my planning (which was inadequate in this area anyway) came to naught, but it worked out anyway.