France – Dordogne – Rocamadour (En)

Last Saturday we went to France, going to Dordogne and the town Rocamadour. France is really good for motorhomes as you have rest areas every 20 kilometres with toilets, rubbish bins and tables and banks to sit and eat and you also can sleep there. We thought to stop in a restaurant in Toulouse but the restaurants in France close at 2 pm and open back at 7 pm. So in the end, we stopped in a rest area very nice near a lake and eat some sandwiches.

The Dordogne area is a natural park and all the way there is beautiful, very green with fantastic little fairy towns. We arrived at the Las Campagnes camping and at the door, there is a machine to pay for the days you want to stay at the camping. 12.50 euros per day, a really good price and cheap and the plots are massive. The facilities are ok, but there is no toilet paper and there are insects all over the place. But the location is amazing, walking distance to the town and in front, there is a farm that you can go to for a free tour and a tasting. The camping has a bbq area, a children’s park, an area for play the boules and a ping pong table. The price is really good, so we recommend it if you want to see Rocamadour. The only thing is that the camping manager only speaks French so communicating with him was pretty difficult, we tried to use Google Translate. And the rest of the people staying at the camping are all French also, so we couldn’t communicate with them either!

In the evening we went to find someplace to have dinner as we just ate sandwiches. The majority of the restaurants only have the menu in French and the waiters do not speak English or Spanish so we couldn’t understand the menus or what was the food! In the end, we finished in a restaurant that has an English menu and the waiters could communicate with us. The restaurant had amazing views of the town. I had an Osso Bucco linguine that I tried for the first time and it was really yummy. And Ben had prawn linguine with chilli. Rocamadour is a medieval town and all the houses are made of stone. Beautiful.

On Sunday we went to see the town. The manager of the camping told us (well he showed us on a map) that we should go from the camping, crossing the farm to the chateau and from there go down to the sanctuary. From the chateau, you are going down an amazing path where there are the 14 stations of the cross. In the sanctuary there are chapels and in one there was a priest doing mass.

From the sanctuary going down the stairs, you arrive at the proper town. The town is a stone pedestrian street with shops, bars, restaurants etc on each side and amazing views. We decided to have lunch in a pub which had English menus. The waiter spoke perfectly Spanish and he could communicate also in English. He was very nice and funny and offered me a job in the pub, told me to come back at 7 pm to start and I only had to smile, hahaha. I told him that will be great but I couldn’t serve any French person. For the first course, I ate peppers stuffed with goat cheese, delicious, and Ben had a salad with chicken pate. For the second course, both had beef in a red wine sauce, with salad and super yummy chips. From there we went to see the rest of the town which finished on a very steep path where you have to rest every 50 metres if you don’t want to have a heart attack! In one of our rest, we saw coming down a priest followed by a lot of men singing hymns.

There are 2 ways to arrive at the town, from the chateau and going down to the sanctuary and the stairs (as we did) or going down the steep path to the town and then going up the stairs to the sanctuary. Many people come here as a pilgrimage and they go up the stairs barefoot or on their knees, we did not see anybody doing this. The town is amazing and beautiful and we recommend coming to visit it. Yesterday we wanted to go to the farm and do the tour and tasting but because it is impossible to communicate with the camping manager, he told us to go at 5 pm and I understood that the farm is open at that time so we went at 7 pm. But no! The tour is only at 5 pm. Maybe we tried again today.

Tomorrow we will go to another area of the dordogne, to La Plage camping where we will join our Scotish friends (we met them in Nerja) and go with them to the rest of France. We will also see Mariana and Cor, from Holland, whom we met in Alicante and they will stay in the same camping for a few days. All that in the next blog!