Honestly, I am a bit embarrassed to write about our summer trip, but at the time, the numbers were low. Also, our trip to Seattle had already been cancelled and we so needed a break from all the homeschooling and home office stress. I guess we needed a break from home. The plan was to visit Frederik’s cousin in the area of Limoges, France (which we also did by the way), but the trip getting there was too long for a day’s drive and as a result, we ended up having a road trip through France with two major stops: the Ardèche and the Limousin.
Our Limousin family trips are always a true joy: good food enjoyed in good company with board games, naps and long conversions to fill in the gaps in between meals.
For our stay in the Ardèche, we rented a safari lodge tent: all the benefits of camping but with a kitchen, a bathroom and a real bed. I can only recommend it. One of the first days there, we went to see Aven d’Orgnac, a formidable cave filled with gigantic and beautiful limestone formations, an incredible spectacle of nature, which all of us enjoyed immensely. On site, there also was a museum about the prehistoric.
Next to the artefacts, videos showed artists building spears and knives out of flintstone as in the ancient times. And outside, at certain times of the day, a very funny archeologist demonstrated how to build a fire. It was an instant hit with our boy, who collected all types of rocks and sticks the whole trip, determined to build his own spear. It sat the perfect tone for another visit to another cave: Chauvet 2.
You probably know the Lascaux cave, the world’s most famous prehistoric artwork cave. It was discovered in 1940, heavily visited by around 1200 visitors a day and closed for the public again in 1963, as all the artwork was damaged by the deteriorating conditions in the cave due to all the visitors. In December 1994, another cave with prehistoric artwork was discovered in France: Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave. The cave has some of the oldest known cave paintings, dating back as far as 36.000 to 30.000 B.C. That is more than 10.000 years older than the oldest Lascaux paintings!
They never opened the cave for the public. In fact, the location is kept a secret as much as possible. But in 2015, they opened a fake cave, Chauvet 2, just a few kilometres from the real cave, replicating the artwork in its full size and carefully reproducing the same sensations of silence, darkness, temperature, humidity and acoustics of the original cave. And I can testify: it was simply sensational.
There were the often depicted hands on the wall, but also an owl drawn in the wet mud, a cave bear drawn on the wall where real cave bears had left their marks, human made bear marks and an array of horses, rhinocerus shaking with their heads, lions,… Absolutely stunning! It felt like walking in a sacred space, a spiritual temple where time had become circular. I left with this profound belief that humans today are no different from our ancestors thousands of years ago. A definite must see if you ever get the chance. Without the guilt of destroying it.