Jack n Karen's Travel Blog: A Vacation from Traveling

I haven't written in several weeks partly because we took a "vacation" from "traveling"!! We traded our time-share & booked a week in Majorca-the largest island in the Balearic Islands archipelago, which are part of Spain and located in the Mediterranean.

Cuevas del Drach"- Dragon Cave - with one of the largest underground lakes in the world

Since 1935 the cave tour includes a live classical performance on a boat on the underground Lake Mertel

we thought this would be a small tourist spot with some retires and ex-pats living there. Were we shocked when we got off the plane to thousands of families! Turns out that the airport is one of the busiest in Europe in the summer months and Majorca's economy is totally based on tourism. German and British make up the most of the 10 million annual visitors.

Karen's favorite Watermellon popsicle on a very hot day!

As we toured the island we saw evidence of the abandoned farming and agricultural industry and now hotels, apartments and houses line the coasts along with shops selling all the plastic and beach stuff a tourist would want! Needless to say Majorca was not our cup-of-tea but it's a great holiday spot for the families with kids.

Our next stay was in southwest France in the Dordogne area. This is famous for wine, walnuts, castles and ancient cave art. There are over 1500 castles in the Dordogne and we stayed for a week in the center of a medieval hamlet complete with its own castle. Castelnaud-lap-Chapelle sits on a hill overlooking the Dordogne River. It's history dates back to the 13th century and was mostly aligned with the English throne and was the "rival" to the French Chateau de Beynac castle just across the river.

The

"our" Castlenaud-la-Chapelle

Beynac Castle

The
One the things we wanted to do was canoe on the Dordogne River. So on Karen's birthday we took a 14 km trip past old towns and castles. There are dozens outfitters up and down the river so a whole lot of canoes and kayaks floating along the relatively smooth water. It was quite warm and stopping for a beer along the shore seemed just perfect. What a fun birthday!

Birthday dinner at a French festival

This area's, however is much more ancient with a series of caves with paintings and etchings dating back 20,000 years. Most of the caves are either closed or have extremely limited visitation to preserve the art. We toured the new Lascaux 4 International Center for Cave Art complex that opened just 7 months ago. It houses exact replicas of the cave paintings and a fantastic museum center. When the tour started the guide said to expect to spend 3 hours-- most of us looked around with skepticism. Sure enough it was just over 3 hours as there was so much information! We were clearly entering a reproduced cave since we walked on a cement path and through a tunnel but once inside it was pretty amazing. After the caves, they have an interpretive room where we could take pictures. Since the actual caves were pclosed in the 1960's and we will never see the originals, this is certainly the next best.