A day trip to Rocamadour

Ok so here are the last of the photos from our vacation in France! I ended up with a full 7 gigs of photos and videos from the trip, so you can understand why it took so long to wade through them and put together coherent posts. 

The car ride featured in the previous post was on our way to Rocamadour,  one of France's most famous historical sites. I had never heard of it, but apparently it's a famous pilgrimage site as well. It's built on a pretty impressive cliff above a river, and is made up of a town at the bottom, and a series of churches/chapels as you go up. We went with Jessika, Leny and the girls, parked at the bottom and climbed the steps up to the top. It was a bit of a climb but I was actually expecting there to be more stairs by the looks of it!

The view from the road-- pretty impressive.
 The basilica at the top isn't accessible from
the bottom part, so we didn't see it.

Cute family

Us 

In the town below. I love moss-covered
French roofs-- pretty!

It really is medieval.

This was above a tunnel (pictured in the last
photo) but wasn't somewhere we had access to.

The reason for all the pilgrimages-- a small
and unassuming wooden Black Madonna.

I liked this little side chapel cut into the rock, and thought 
the statue was interesting.

Sweet sweet sisters! As you can see even the stairs are
 made from old cut stone... falling down would hurt. 

This is apparently the fragment of a famous sword
Durendal which according to legend was presented
 to none other than Charlemagne by an angel. He
then gave it to his nephew Roland. Check out
Wikipedia for some more info.

On our way back down, in front of the
aforementioned tunnel.

Hopefully we'll be back to visit soon!!

_____

In other news, after a lengthy legal process (don't get either of us started...) Othman and I finally officialized our marriage here in Morocco last week, yay! We went out for dinner to celebrate and had a lovely time and some delicious sushi.