Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Live from St-Cirq 4

7/30/04

Our fourth day in the Perigord is as perfect as the preceding three. When I wake at around 8 a.m., the sky is a cloudless, azure expanse and birds are chirping and swooping from limb to limb in the linden trees. A tractor revs up somewhere below in the valley, and the clatta-clatta-clatta of the local train punctuates the silence as it passes by below.

Out of nowhere a thought comes into my head - picnic by a lake - and I formulate a plan. I wake Taylor and while he's showering I get out "le freezer pack" and fill it with ham and sausage and cheese and cornichons and pain biologique and two petits pains and two bottles of "Ice Tea Lite Mangue." By about 10:30 we are off into Les Eyzies to buy a local Michelin map #329. Either I took it back to America with me, or renters have taken it, and I need it to find this place that just skims on the surface of my memory from years and years ago. In fact, as it turns out, I could have found the place with no map at all, but it's a nice bit of reassurance to have the map.

We head from Les Eyzies toward Sarlat and turn off at the sign for Tamnies. It's a curvy, tiny road that passes under numerous rocky overhangs and by a prehistoric site with a giant fish sculpture, the Abri Cap Blanc. We see signs for the Etang de Tamnies, but also keep seeing brackish bits of water with algae that I fear are the swimming place I've been dreaming of. It's been at least 8 years since I've even thought of this place we are destined for, and I've never actually stopped there, so it is all a bit of a big wish. Somehow it just seems like the perfect day for a picnic and a swim by a lake, and somewhere in the recesses of my mind there is a good place to do this.

A couple of kms past the town of Tamnies there it is - a manmade lake with a big sand beach and a tree-lined shore with picnic tables galore. Granted, it is as Taylor points out, a place for people traveling in caravans and local folks without swimming pools to relax and get cool, but it is looking amazingly special to us. We enter and pay the 1,80 euros apiece and park under a tree near a free picnic table. All around us are French families, with the husbands wearing Speedos and sporting wraparound sunglasses, the wives in floral two-piece bathing suits, and kids wearing the childrens' equivalents. They are picnicking with the same ingredients we've brought along - cheeses and sausages and ham and bread and cornichons and radishes and olives and mineral water and wine. The French do love a picnic.

We bring out our "freezer pack" and unload it and feast on ham and cheese and cornichons and radishes and almonds and Ice Tea Lite Mangue. Then we pack all the food back in the car and head for the "beach," a lovely pure sand stretch of land where we set down an old cotton comforter. We read for awhile (we're both on our third book since landing in France), then go out into the water, which according to a sign posted at the cafe is 34 degrees Centigrade. I'd believe it. It's warm and lovely - sandy all the way out to a floating pier that is occupied by a Dutch family with about 10 kids who are busy pushing each other off the pier as fast as they can manage it. We swim to the pier and climb on amid a jostling multi-lingual group of kids, then soon slide off and swim back to shore.

We get paddles and a ball and play ping-pong on a table that is solid concrete - even the
"net," which is frustrating, as the ball flies off into the hot sand more often than it should. We swim out to the pier and back. We read, we swim. We watch the families who are here and comment on them - mostly French, probably on inexpensive vacations, like people who camp in the USA, but eating better. We theorize, we swim, we read, we play ping-pong. Before long, it's mid-afternoon. We decide to go up to Tamnies to have a cool drink and check it out.

Tamnies is a certified "ville fleurie" and boy does it live up to its name. I think they need to tone down the flowers, actually - there are too many. The Hotel Laborderie is really the only place in town, and we sit outside on its terrace and have a cool drink and marvel at the floral displays that mark the village - hanging plants amid two-storey-tall tree displays and basket upon basket of ivy geraniums. It's a pretty little village gone haywire with floral displays.

Back home we begin one of those games Taylor so loves to play that consume our vacations - beginning with A, name a country or state or state capital. This while playing endless rounds of ping-pong .Albania, Algeria, Austria, Armenia..........The heat subsides and we jump in the pool and continue the game. For dinner we continue the picnic and have more ham and sausage and cornichons and radishes.

To be honest, we've done absolutely nothing useful today. And we don't care a whit. The moon is a tangerine globe hanging over the cliffs of the Vezere and the screech owls and cuckoos are gathering in the poplars and bamboo that surround us.