27^th Apr LA ROQUE GAGEAC –GROTTE DES COMBARELLES - BERGERAC – CADILLAC

Not a particularly good day today. We got up early (for us) to go to Grotte des Combarelles; we arrived about 10.00 a.m. – all the tickets (for all the caves) had already sold out!!!! And the caves are closed over the weekend; we were very disappointed. Apparently you can buy tickets on line so we’ve decided that when we come back to Britain (to sort out moving furniture etc) we’ll drive this way and book tickets in advance.

Yesterday’s aire was quite expensive (for an aire) 3€ to park daytime, plus 7€ to park overnight, plus 3€ for water (apart from a pretty village we didn’t get much for our money, there were a couple of tourist shops and that was it, all the restaurant etc were still closed as tourist season doesn’t really start until June) – we did without water as today’s aire was supposed to be free. So we drove to Bergerac (I’m humming the theme tune in my head) and the aire was closed!! – This keeps happening in France. We had to travel another 55 miles to the next aire, which is open but, there’s no drinking water; which is a real nuisance as we are pretty desperate (we have an emergency supply of 25 litres that will last hopefully until after breakfast tomorrow).

Whilst we were looking for the closed Bergerac aire we met two English couples (also looking for the aire) they said they had been in France for four weeks and only managed to sit outside on two days – we’ve decided to head back to Portugal, hopefully the weather will improve once we start going south again. We also want to go back to Donkey Quinta and assess the access; we travelled there in the back of a small car and it appeared to be quite narrow, we want to see if we’ll be able to get the van in – if we can’t it doesn’t bode well for getting our furniture in or any building material we need to purchase.