Hotel de la Poste is a great place, the nicest of the hotels in which we stayed. Big room, big bathroom, and most importantly, big breakfast. The help-yourself buffet had meat (!), eggs and cereal along with all the usual stuff. Excellent.

Before leaving town, we walked up the hill to the Chartres cathedral, famous for its blue stained glass. It is a bit of a frankenbuilding; one spire is Roman, the other Gothic (added much later of course). It was to be torn down during (I think) the Revolution, but whoever was in charge ran out of money and/or never got around to it.

One spire Roman, the other Gothic. Which is which? Nobody will ever know.

As it turned out, we misjudged our travel time slightly, and could not make the booked tour in the caves, but we found another cave (turns out there are 300 of these things scattered in Southern France and Northern Spain), actually a replica of one whose paintings are estimated to be even older. The Lascaux site was only discovered about 50 years ago, but after a decade of touring, it was discovered that the tour groups and the modern ventilation combined to produce mold and calcium deposits on the immaculately preserved cave paintings, estimated at about 17,000 years old. The site was then closed to the public, but a replica of the caves was painstakingly built about 100m away in a cave now called Lascaux II. It is not the ultimate in cave tours, but it was still pretty cool to see these things in a more or less natural form (the artists who did the reproduction tried to stay as close to the primitive art tools as possible, and the copy is supposed to be quite faithful).

Finally, it was time to head back to Bordeaux to meet up with Brian for supper (he had been busy at the wine-tasting course). After some ugly traffic upon reaching the city, we were "home", such as it is.