Middle Earth

Woke this morning to our first day of gray skies, thunder and lightning, and heavy rain. My telephone weather forecaster has been predicting rain every day of our trip so far, so we consider ourselves fortunate. Besides, it's quite beautiful, looking out from our hotel window...




Not quite the Mediterranean of your imagination, but lovely anyway.

Yesterday we took our longest trip, up into the mountains north of Montpellier, to visit the Grottes des Demoiselles--caves high in the mountains and deep underground, formed in the course of the millennia and spectacularly beautiful, as we shall see. But first a lunch stop at Laroque, a village a few kilometers north of our destination, to which the road led us along the river through a deep, rocky gorge...







Here's the medieval village of Laroque:




Our restaurant overlooked a bend in the river with a water race...



... where a heron came to fish...



A lucky picture, that last one. And here's a lovely tree of a kind I've never to my knowledge seen before, and whose name I don't know...


... near the entrance to the caves. The tram that usually takes visitors up the steep slope to the passageways that lead into the caves was on the blink, so we had first to negotiate a substantial number of steps alongside the tram tracks in order to reach the start point. The climb proved well worth the effort, though, as these pictures will show. The spaces inside the mountain are nothing short of amazing, cathedral-esque, with stalagtites and stalagmites of every conceivable form, some quite new and tiny, others more massive even than the redwoods of California. A part of the fun was finding images in the rock formations. I'll leave you to imagine your own from these pictures, which are hopelessly inadequate to express the grandeur of it all...








... except for this one, below, a statuesque form from which the caves take their name: this "demoiselle" is seen to be an image of the Virgin and child; she stands at the very center of the space that is called the "cathedral", surrounded by a multitude of architectural columns and, higher up, "organ pipes," and choral balconies. We hear that that they actually come here on occasions like Christmas to celebrate with song in the cave's extraordinary accoustics.


Here's one tired little boy on the way home...



... and two good-looking parents when we took them out to dinner to an excellent restaurant later in the evening.




Fine cuisine and excellent service at a table looking our over the beach and the sea... This will be our major culinary extravagance of the trip!