As a child, there was nothing I loved more than sprawling on the living room floor with a volume of the
World Book Childcraft Children's Encyclopedia. There were books on every topic that could possibly capture a child's imagination: world and space, fairy tales from all over the world, the human body and how things work. But my favorite volume of them all was "Mysteries and Fantasies".
That book was my first introduction to such places as Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Nazca Lines. The fact that we still didn't know why or how our ancestors built many of these structures was absolutely fascinating to me. I have an entire bucket list devoted to all the places I had read about in Childcraft and hope to visit one day. This June, I was super excited to be able to visit one of them: The
Lascaux Caves.
I knew going in, that the original caves had been closed to visitors years ago, and that we would be looking at replicas. So my expectations were suitably lowered. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and beauty of the replicas. A lot of effort had been taken to match the originals. They even used the same materials and techniques that we believe our ancestors used!
So I was somewhat surprised to find myself walking out of the caves still feeling disappointed and very dissatisfied with my experience. If this was the only cave we had visited in the region, I would have been quite disillusioned. Fortunately, earlier in the day, we visited another prehistoric cave that was everything that I had hoped our Lascaux experience would be, but wasn't:
Font de Gaume
Along the trail to the entrance of Font de Gaume
All of our stuff in storage!