Challenge for day. No insults between Scott and Ken
10 minutes later.
Ken: It seems kind of boring and placid without insults.
Terry: You mean peaceful?
Scott: Is this what a normal family is like?
Terry: Heavy sigh.
The plan for the day was to visit the Grottes d’Arcy, then walk about 10 km to Semilizard (i tend to anglicize French names that I can’t pronounce).
Today we walked on every kind of trail imaginable – grinder, forest trail, narrow pavement, sidewalks, farm tracks, forest haul road, abandoned road and grassy track.
Peter calls busy highway “grinders”
Crepes at breakfast for the first time. I think Peter ate them all!
About a kilometer on the grinder to get to the grottes (caves spelled with an accent refers to the wine caves whereas grottes are what we would think of as caves with stalagmites and bats). Misty morning and too many trucks but it was only for a km.
The Cure River.
Reminds me of driving through northern Ontario.
Les moos.
These caves house 28,000 year old cave paintings, the oldest paintings that are still accessible to the public. The caves are by guided tour only, and in French. Luckily, there were only two others on the tour and they spoke English, so the guide did the tour in English for us.
The cave paintings were a little underwhelming to me, other than the handprint, but the caverns were spectacular. And. Hmmm. Okay. I have to confess. You are not supposed to take photos in the caves. We were near the end when I…um…well…had a sudden and urgent need to visit the bathrooms, which entailed a mad dash back down the trail to the entrance while the rest of the tour continued. I could not resist a quick snap.
Look at how smiley we are. Remember this later in the post.
With our guide Edouard.
An opportunity bench.
Do you think if I sat here long enough a school bus would pick me up?
Our first vending machine. We used to see these in some of the villages – juice cheese, butter, fruit, yogurt, bacon…better than no store at all. Ken got sunflower seeds (grown locally).
Called a red slug (even though he’s orange). 4 inches long.
We couldn’t understand why Ken didn’t choose this optimal bench and went up the hill instead.
Oh no!!! Are we going to have to backtrack and add 6 km to our day?? Whew! Closed to cars and motorized vehicles only. Because of a landslide. Um – shouldn’t we backtrack?
Terry thumbing her nose at Ken.
The landslide area.
Scott is seen lolling in his chair on the right pwhile the rest of us plug on. Little did we know that soon we would be hating la Route de Montillot and cursing Scott for taking us this way, just because he didn’t want to do 10 km on a grinder with big trucks.
Over one mile up a very steep hill. I have to admit to being a little worried about Ken at the top. But he’s still with us as I type this 2 days later.
Who’s smiling now???
Finally almost at SemiLizard.
Very cool rocks on this fence. The BugSnax came out to frolic in the crevices.
Earlier in the day, I was telling Ken that we hadn’t seen any of the metal crosses that we saw at every village crossroads in 2023 but today we saw two of them.
Kayak launch…and Scott leading the way.
The view from our home for the night.
Started easy, ended tough. We all survived though, especially with a life saving meal at the end of the day at an actually open bistro. It was full of noisy card players and is obviously the community gathering spot. No picture of it full of life sadly, just at a quiet breakfast the next morning.
VF Britannica Via Campaniensis Voie de Vezelay 2025 