What a luxury – our hotel was so quiet and we were soooo tired, that we slept in until 9:15. When I realized what time it was, I gave a yelp and jumped out of bed – breakfast ended at 9:30!! In record time we were sitting at the breakfast table slurping café au lait and munching croissants. Yum – this is life in France!

After finishing breakfast we went back to the room and did the first round of laundry until we got chased out by the cleaning staff.

By noon we were in the Museum of Prehistory and enjoyed our visit to the well-laid-out and informative museum. One cool thing was that they had little half-shell booth-like areas where a person could sit on a bench and view videos of handworkers demonstrating how various tools and weapons were made in pre-historic times.

As you may have guessed, by the time we were done in the museum I was having hunger pangs, so we found a simple restaurant with a terrace not far from the river. Salads were once again the order of the day. Werner had his first “duck extravaganza”, lettuce topped with magret de canard, and a slab of paté. My salad was topped with (too many) lardons, bleu cheese and walnuts. It was tasty, but not exactly light.

As we were both still recovering from the effects of an overnight train trip, several short nights of sleep and the previous day’s strenuous bike ride, we made our way back to the hotel and took a short nap after which Werner set out to find the perfect swimming hole and I stayed behind to relax in the hotel’s lovely garden.

Werner got back a couple of hours later and joined me in the garden for an hour, after which we meandered to his newly discovered swimming hole, which was on the river about a ten-minute walk away from the hotel.
What a magical place! The setting sun glistened across the water and it was so clear that you could see the flecks of gold pyrite glistening in the sand of the river bed.

As we made our way back up into the village, we paused at the public boules court to watch a family play their evening game.

By 9pm I was feeling a bit peckish so we stopped for a glass of wine and salad for me. The salad of lettuce topped by regional goat cheese (cabecou) was tasty but at 11€ too expensive, and the wine at 4€ a glass was in the teeniest wine glasses I’d ever seen. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. The only sort-of highlight was that from where we were sitting we had a perfect view of the “light show” projections on the cliff faces above the Museum of Prehistory. Unfortunately the show was a bit lame, but actually fitting when you think that Les Éyzies is a town of 900 souls.

We didn’t linger at the café and weren’t quite ready for bed when we got back to the hotel, so we capped off the evening by sipping a fine glass of wine at one of the outdoor tables next to the burbling mill stream.

Day 4

Route

Distance

Elapsed Ride Time