Castelnaud

Standing guard over our favorite bakery in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle is the Château de Castelnaud. We visited with our friends S & B during the week before Christmas on one of the rare sunny days of our two months in the Dordogne. (S & B get all the credit – they brought the sun with them on […]

Les Jardins de Marqueyssac

The week before Christmas we had the pleasure of hosting our friends S & B for a week. The floodwaters were receding from their high point, having flooded the road just a few houses down – and making us happy we’d rented a place on the second floor, so we headed out for the longest […]

Man the Pumps!

Have we mentioned the rain? Yes, after a brief respite, the heavenly faucets are once again open and the river is rising rather quickly. And the forecast is … rain! The object sticking out of the water furthest to the left above is the sign in the picture below: This is nothing, however, compared to […]

Hiking Périgord: Langlade

You’d think we’d know better by now…but no. When the forecast changed from rain to sun for the afternoon, we headed out for a hike actually expecting to stay dry. We started in the nearby village of St Vincent de Cosse, walking up a road that turned into a forest track. Seemingly in the middle […]

Sarlat’s Christmas Market

Sarlat is all dressed up with Christmas teddy bears and the holiday market is full of people sipping vin chaud (hot mulled wine) and contemplating gift purchases. We had thought vin chaud was an evening thing, but there people were, imbibing before noon! Father Christmas (Père Noël) shows up on posters around town, but we […]

Hiking Périgord: Carlucet

We spent a week in Carlucet during our first trip to France together. We thought it would be fun to go see how it looks fifteen years later, so today we started our hike there. Some things seemed just the same – we recognized the B&B (now a gîte, or whole house rental) right away. […]

Hiking Périgord: Vitrac

We started Monday’s hike in the hamlet of Le Colombier between La Roque-Gageac and Vitrac. This handsome fellow was one of the first things we saw: He was either posing or studiously ignoring us… We were once again mainly walking through the woods. At the highest point of the hike we came out to a […]

Hiking Périgord: La Treille

Sunday’s hike wasn’t the most photogenic, as we mainly were walking through the woods, first on small roads, then on trails. We started in the parking lot of one of the local castles, Castelnaud, and our hike took us west and north. Castelnaud is high on a hill overlooking the Dordogne. We didn’t go in, […]

Seen Around Town

We had a particularly pretty sunrise a few days ago. Some days recently it’s been so foggy we can’t even see the other side of the river! The birds we were missing in Brittany are abundant here. The cliffs house hundreds of black birds called choucas. Every dawn and dusk huge flocks swirl overhead, coming […]

Dordogne Barns

There’s a style of barn here in the Dordogne that we’ve never seen anywhere else. What’s the purpose of the slatted sections? Air flow for drying walnuts? No, tobacco drying! We never imagined tobacco as a local product until we read it in Wikipedia. The local barns also have a lot of individual character, not […]