Life's a Stitch

It turns out that yesterday we were right on a Camino route that starts in Paris and goes through Bordeaux. Hmmm, I feel the seeds of another Camino dream starting to sprout. 

This morning I had the opportunity to introduce Bruce to geocaching. Two very brief previous opportunities to cache in France were fruitless due to weather and time. This experience was all about success. Bruce finds his first cache at La Tour de Beaumont high above the river Gironde.

 There was an art installation entitled "Museum" at the top that had picture frames with cut outs through the mini museum's wall in order to enjoy "artwork" of the French countryside.

The second successful cache was at the Port Maubert, where kids were learning to sail:

I'm hoping to have a successful geocaching experience if we get to Morocco this trip. It's a reasonably priced short distance from Spain. 

We picked up C, still in Camino recovery mode and headed to the town of Saintes with its Roman amphitheater, location of geocache #3. It has the similar gory details to the Colusseum in Rome such as a gravel floor to absorb blood. 

After finding the cache we went on to the cache at the Arch of Germanicus, built a loooong time ago in the years 18 & 19. In the 1840's it was moved 15 meters and restored. 

C took a break in the park after a successful find.

We visited the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Saintes, which had a history of being destroyed in various conflicts and rebuilt in phases to it's simple but elegant current state. We didn't find the geocache, though.

No more caches scheduled so we stopped in at Sainte's public library, a renovated convent and continue to admire the interesting mixtures of old and new architecture.

Whew, that was a busy day!