Périgord/Dordogne Valley – Day 1 – Getting to Bordeaux
Monday, 19-May-2025
Tags: Travel
So, why the Périgord/Dordogne-Vézère Valleys? Larry and I became fans of the “Bruno, Chief of Police” series written by British author Martin Walker, former editor and international correspondent for UPI and The Guardian, among other careers and skills. Walker lives part of the year in Le Bugue in the Vézère Valley. Benoit Courreges — Bruno – a town policeman in Saint-Denis (actually Le Bugue), is a former peacekeeper soldier in Sarajavo who is a gourmet cook and whose approach to policing is to keep people out of jail, especially the youth. Somehow there is always a murder or international intrigue in the Périgord that he ends up helping to solve. We learned about all the towns in the area, all the caves, all the castles, all the food, and all the wine. We decided we really had to visit. After 20 Bruno books, we barely needed to consult a travel book.
We left for France on Sunday evening (May 18), so that was day 0. After a relatively uneventful trip flying Boston to Paris (CDG) to Bordeaux (BOD), we arrived in Bordeaux early in the afternoon. (Although the transfer in CDG required several miles of walking, a train ride, more walking, security, passport control, and more walking. But we made it.) We took the tram "A" from right outside the terminal to the Mériadeck stop which was right outside our hotel, FirstName Bordeaux.
FirstName Bordeaux taken from the side
First Name Bordeaux reception area (with mascot) and restaurant/bar
After a two hour nap, we took about an hour walk in the downtown area. We had no particular target, we just wanted to get the lay of the land. We did see the Hotel de Ville (city hall) and a few other sites. We went back to our hotel, relaxed a bit more. We wanted a fairly simple dinner so we took a short walk to Brasserie Liber for dinner. Eileen had magret de canard (duck breast) and I had braised pork. Both were very good.
After dinner we walked back to the hotel and turned in for the night.
Some context for the trip:
The whole trip is in the administrative region call Nouvelle Aquitaine in southwest France, which is the largest of the 18 administrative regions (the 13 European regions shown below and 5 overseas regions). All of the places that we are visiting are in two departments, Bordeaux is in Gironde, and all of the other places are in Dordogne. It's a bit difficult to map the French administrative divisions into US equivalents, but a region is roughly equivalent to a state and a department is roughly equivalent to a county (but bigger in many cases).
Our days are organized as follows:
- Two nights in Bordeaux (days 1 and 2)
- Two nights in Bergerac area (Monbazillac) (days 3 and 4)
- Four nights in Sarlat-la-Canéda (days 5-8)
- Four nights in Les Eyzies (days 9-12)
- One night at a hotel near the airport in Bordeaux (day 13)
- Home (day 14)
Links:
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Larry and Eileen Samberg
