C'EST LA VIE - THAT'S LIFE

Luzech 12th June

Today started with the placement of Roger’s travel bug in Cahors’ natural spring cache. When we last visited it the water was blue and clear, however the night storms had affected the colour and volume.

If you are wondering what a travel bug is, it isn’t something caught on the plane. It is a trackable souvenir you set a mission for on the geocache website and then release into a cache. Anybody who finds a trackable is suppose to log it and move it on to help it achieve its goal. We have had several of these and experience shows they go missing after a while as people physically collect them rather than virtually collect them. My brother gave us some for Christmas and we released Roger’s in the first week; however it didn’t move, so we retrieved it and placed it in the Cahors cache as it is more popular. The photos below are 1) our travel bug and 2) all the ones we have collected to take back to NZ.

It is our rest day today, so after a late start we went to get the groceries via Luzech. Luzech is an Oppidum town, French word of the day (or Latin) it means enclosed occupied space in the form of a settlement. On our first cache we went to view the evidence (ruins) that Gallo-Roman’s were here in the 5th century. At that time the town was built high up, however in later centuries the medieval and current town was built in the valley. Due to attacks during the Middle Ages the best way to fortify your town was to limit the ways in, so Luzech was built in a valley and walled in. The Lot River goes into the valley and does a full loop like Cahors, resulting in the creation of a peninsula. Boats can’t navigate the Lot River here because there is a hydropower station and a dam, with no lock. Our second cache took us into the town where we discovered the old railway bridge. We were supposed to do a 5km circuit around the hill on the peninsula but ran out of time.

Our taste of France today and proof that I do eat my greens, is Sucrine (sweet baby gem lettuce), and obviously cook played with my food, whoops I mean presented it nicely.

Today’s secret garden of Cahors is No.8 the flower beds of Saint Etienne Church. The flowers are used to decorate the altar and are planted in three beds, white and blue for the Virgin Mary, red and orange for the suffering of Christ and yellow and gold for the mystery of the resurrection. I chose this garden because we found out today that the cache hidden near the church has vanished and therefore we have no cause to keep lurking around the drain pipe of the church.