Cadillac was our first destination on Saturday morning. It is another wonderful medieval town with a chateau, ramparts, narrow streets and a large busy market where stalls line several streets and squares. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe who emigrated to what is now the USA, was the founder of Detroit and Governor of Louisiana. The Cadillac division of General Motors, and Cadillac, Michigan are named after him and resonates with our visit to the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo three years ago.
It has a wider social mix than some of the places we have been to. We purchased the things we needed, browsed the stalls and then stopped for a coffee. Tradition has it that the men sit in a café with a coffee (or a beer) while the women do the shopping. We restricted ourselves to coffee. The egg seller had some interesting chickens on display.
We used to keep chickens and a friend once bought me as a gift, a little book entitled ‘Extraordinary Chickens’. This one would certainly have been in it. There was a bookshop with new and secondhand sections and also vinyl and DVDs but if I had gone in there, I might not have been seen for the rest of the day. We did have seats booked at the Union Bordeaux-Bègles versus Lyons rugby match at the Stade Chaban-Delmas that evening. The local team were victorious 32-10 and afterwards we had a lovely meal in the city centre.
On Sunday afternoon we walked by the river past cornfields and round the old port of Rion. The river has silted up over the centuries so the port, citadel and village now sit uphill of the river bank. There are old huts and prawn fishermen’s nets suspended over the water. At the end of the riverside path, where it turns back uphill, there was a very new and upmarket fishing hut and pier with numerous signs telling us this was private property so we headed back up to the port. the local cats, sitting on doorsteps viewed our friends’ dog with great suspicion. We could hear the sound of French rap coming from the village centre where some young people were enjoying the music and stuck our heads into the bar at the Tourist Information Centre but wanted to stay outside to enjoy the good weather.
