Tourist Season

For the past couple of weeks we have been hosting friends.  Pat and Mel (my cousin) came for 4 days and we took them to an obligatory Plant Fair as well as dragging them along to our Garden Club meeting in a member's garden.
We then did a meal for friends with their friends, followed by a visit to a restaurant to meet up with a couple from England who follow this blog!
We reached the peak of the season last week when we had friends from Birmingham arrive on Tuesday.  However the garden needs had to be met and they helped us on Wednesday morning by rushing off to Lidl to buy 120 Pansies at a very keen price!  We were joined Wednesday evening by friends from Edinburgh ... the start of a lovely period of 'social drinking', long meals and stimulating conversations.
Thursday we had lunch in a restaurant in Cahors before going on a 2 hour guided tour of the medieval part of the city.

Our guide spoke English, although he wasn't 100% fluent, but he was very knowledgeable ... we saw the Roman ruins uncovered in the building of an underground carpark, explored the narrow medieval streets, the Bishop's 'palace', the cloisters and then finally the Cathedral, which this year is celebrating 900 years since it's founding.

Friday morning was recovery but in the afternoon we all went to the 'Grottes de Cougnac' near Gourdon for a guided tour of two caves; the first a splendid display of Stalactites and ...mites, the second containing prehistoric wall paintings ... enjoyable since the tour group was not too large, the caves are also not too large, and the guide spoke in English (just as well as she spoke very quickly and giving a lot of information, which made our efforts at translating for our friends a bit touch and go!)

Our friends all left on Saturday morning so we were able to 'chill' for the rest of the day and abstemiously go to bed early.