On Tuesday both schools had a day-long randonnée, which consisted of biking, walking, and picnicking (of course), with some cultural/historical learning thrown in. Chris and I went along with Julian's class. I was a bit unsure how I would handle the 10K but quickly found my role as nudger and prodder of stragglers, and managed just fine.
All the students in the Dordogne were out on randonnées that day, and so it felt -- and this happens a lot in France -- like we were not just a little group doing its activity and going about its business, but were part of something larger, something shared. The children in my group sang as we walked down the road and the path that wound through the fields, and held hands, and boys walked with their arms around each other's shoulders. One of my stragglers confessed that he was starving and offered to share a hunk of cake he had hidden in his jacket. The whole group were avid pickers and pluckers of anything at all, and we had to stay on top of them so they didn't decimate the cornfields. Here they are lunging at poppies...
Our first stop was the Chateau Montréal, which is in the distance here...
Of course the picnic involved sandwiches, the usual and scrumptious butter-and-ham-on-baguette, but also there were half-tomatoes and little quiches. The longer part of the walk came after, as we wound through the woods and past houses that had me faint with envy. The children were yanking up the newly sprouted fern fronds and chasing, poking, and fanning each other with them. We stopped to see a dolmen, a kind of prehistoric table made of big stones, thought to have been part of a burial ritual. We stopped at a prehistoric forge, where we could find hunks of rock with iron ore, and hunks of rock that were the leftover bits after smelting, or at least you could, en principe, find these things; at that point in the hike I could no longer bend over, and I'm not sure many of the adults could. And my dogs were barking. My stragglers had gotten a second wind after lunch and were no longer straggling, and not a whine was heard from any of the children, even as we approached our 10th K.
Now that we're practically in our last month here, we've discovered the absolutely fantastic map series that shows not just the roads, not just the back roads, but all the houses and footpaths, so, en principe, we're ready for all manner of randonnées ourselves. Next year.
