“One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.”
Edith Wharton
Recently some American friends, Bob and Kathy, went on a walking tour of the prehistoric Dordogne region, not far from the caves of Lascaux (considered the Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric Art). Bob slipped and fell while hiking and broke an ankle. He was taken to a local emergency room in the village of Sarlat. Fortunately, it was a clean break and only needed a cast. Suddenly, their plans to visit me the following week changed.
Kathy wrote, “Twice a day we roll about 1/2 a mile into the town of Les Eyzies and have lunch and dinner at this cute restaurant, Le Cafe de Le Mairie where they have obviously gotten to know us, and where we can just roll right in from the sidewalk. It’s great….plus one evening they had medieval music and dancing….what a delight as we ate outside! We also met an American woman from Portland who is here cycling all by herself and who we now have dinner with every night. How sweet is that? Others we met, George and Gretchen from Hawaii, helped push Bob up the hill to see the Musée de Prehistoire and Abri de Passad (30,000 year old site of human remains) which we couldn’t have seen without their help! We really connected with them. They have become friends.”
A few hours later we arrived at Rocamadour, wedged into the side of a mountain high above the Alzou Valley in the Quercy region. Rocamadour has been a holy site since the Upper Paleolithic era and is one of the stops on the pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostella. A stream of miracles and legends about Rocamadour has been spun since the late 11th century, when the remains of a man purported to be St. Amadour (lover of rocks) were discovered and heralded by the ringing of a bell above the Black Virgin and Child in the Chapel of Notre Dame.
We stayed overnight at a quiet hotel tucked into the woods nearby and within walking distance to the village. In the early evening we meandered down the winding path of the Stations of the Cross. I’d read that early pilgrims said a prayer after climbing each step on their knees and at each landing said the entire rosary. If we’d chosen to we had the option of taking an elevator from the sanctuaries and the first station of the cross to the twelfth.
The following day we drove along winding backroads to another hilltop village, St. Cirq Lapopie. Originally enclosed by fortified gates, this medieval village was created out of a magnificent, rocky escarpment some 300 feet above the Lot river, like the roots of a petrified tree. Historically, St. Cirq was a stronghold of the Viscounts of Quercy, the heads of 3 governing families – the Lapopies, the Gourdons and the Cardaillacs. In times of conflict, this site was strategically important. During the wars between England and France in the middle of the 13th century, southern Quercy was ceded to England by Henri II, and in the middle of the 16th century it was the bastion of Protestants and the scene of brutal religious warfare. The beautiful stone and colombage (half-timbered) houses which line the steep winding streets, date from the 13th through 16th centuries.
Before returning to Cahors to spend the night we decided to visit the Grotte du Pech Merle, just above St. Cirq-Lapopie. Over many thousands of years humans have left their handprints, quite literally, in caves here, dating from 25,000 BC. On the way up the steep, circuitous incline, my van’s exhaust started to emit billows of white smoke. We made it into the Grotte’s parking lot and stopped the car, checked the oil and called the mechanic at our garage back home. He said the car shouldn’t be driven and suggested I call road service, which I did.
After waiting an hour and a half, the three of us crammed into the front seat of the cab of a large tow truck next to Erick, the operator, and were driven 50 km to a garage outside of Montauban, a large town south of Cahors. Erick, couldn’t have been more friendly. Surprisingly, he knew the small village I live in from his motorcycle days racing and touring the countryside. He called road service for me while we were driving and to my amazement I learned that not only would I not be charged for the tow, but we would be driven back to my home, 196 kilometers southwest, free of charge!
The garage had closed an hour before, but the owner let us stay in the waiting room. It was 7:30 in the evening by the time we were picked up by a handsome, retired gentleman driving a brand new, top of the line, Renault. Our hour and a half ride back home couldn’t have been more comfortable. Along the way, the driver and I spoke of politics and the beauty of the Gers départment where I live, an area he was only familiar with from driving through to someplace else.
Sometimes we step off the cliff of what we know into uncertainty and letting go becomes a kind of wonderful vertigo. There’s a shift in perspective when we recognize that traveling life’s path has many obstacles and we can’t be sure of anything. Because we feel more secure when we have a sense of predictability, we often deny a simple truth: that nothing stays the same, sometimes perfect strangers are friends we haven’t met thus far, and miracles do happen.
