Croissants and coffee for breakfast! Perfect!

The nightime sounds, as well as the ubiquitous owls, were of rutting deer in the distance.

Then headed onto town to post home my MSR stove, as my gas had finally run out and I have moved on to a French Camping Gas stove that I had bought in Tours. It has been a nightmare trying to find the screw-thread type gas cannisters. The most common are the Camping Gas puncture type, followed by the Camping Gas answer to the screw-thread, a green capped clamp-on variety, which is what I am now using.

But ici le France! The Post Office was férmed!

So I went onto the museum instead who kindly let the dogs in, being Guide Dogs. Very worthwhile visit. More rock engravings: women with large stylised bottoms as I have seen in Neandertal in Germany. Some wonderful 3D relief carvings of bison. A replica of a wooly mamouth was huge and you would not have wanted a huge jawed prehistoric bear in your cave!

Came back to the campsite for lunch, then put the cooling jackets on the dogs and headed down the river towards St. Ciro and le Grotte du Sorcier. A good 6k later with aome blacktop and we arrived. Topsy a bit the qorse for wear and limping slightly. The Grotte rurned out to be a cave dwelling built into the vertical limestone cliffs that flank this valley. The ones in Les Eyzies even have great overhangs rhat would have protected their inhabitants from the elements. The custodienne, who I later found out was called  ‘Anne-yes’, which is a much nicer french way of saying Agnes, kindly  made me a coffee.

With my eye-sight, the lines illuminated by our guide during the subsequent tour, which produced gasps of “mais oui!” from the audience, remained a mystery to me.  Anneyes took pity on Topsy and kindly gave us a lift back into town and joined us for a pizza. The portions were very generous and two very interested labradors watched as half a pizza was transferred to tin-foil!