Bordeaux and Palmiers

I find it pretty incredible that, after three summers of coming back to Paziols and conducting the same program over and over again, there are still things I haven’t seen: festivals, hikes, museums that we always plan to visit and end up not being able to work into the schedule, or excursions that we do with the group half at a time, and I’m left back at the house, since I don’t drive.

Of course, there are also the things I see multiple times. I’ve been to Carcassonne at least four different times, made the drive back and forth to Barcelona and Perpignan even more. I’ve seen every single one of the Cathar châteaux twice (Aguilar even more). To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d have much more to offer you with regards to travel this year.

Boy, was I wrong.

Because even when you live in a place, even when you spend every spare moment visiting sites in the area, even when you think you couldn’t have possibly missed one thing… well, you always find something.

The Musée de la Préhistoire in Tautavel has been on our list since the beginning: I’ve been four times now… it’ll be five when we go with the second group later this summer. I took anthropology in college, so I’ve become the designated translator and teacher when we move through the two museums, looking at the tools and fossils on display and learning about the history of man.

There is a reason that the musée was placed in Tautavel: the town is the home of the Caune de l’Arago, the place where the first specimen of European man was found in a cave in the mountains. It is still an archaeological site, and a short hike allows any visitor to reach it.

Some kids made the hike last year–the one in the wheelchair we had last year was one of them– but I didn’t get to make the trek. This year, however, everyone wanted to take the walk, and so I made it with them.

I love the way that every year brings something new–it’s nice to see the kids witness the sites I now know by heart for the first time, but I also like to see new things for myself. The walk up to the top of the caune is a little bit steep, and the day we did it, it began to rain, which made the rocks slip and slide. I spent a lot of my time ensuring that none of the kids were falling off the cliff itself, but when we made it to the top, I had time to stop and see the view.

Of course, the walk back down was also spent giving a hand to the kids as they carefully tried to find footholds in the rocks, but I also had time to look out onto the mountains that surround us and think about the prehistoric man–the one whose bones are forever encased in glass just a short drive away–and think about how much and yet how little this landscape must have changed since he walked these paths.

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