Very old cave art

We headed 300 miles southeast to the Rhone-alps region.  Our destination was the L'Cavernes du Pont D'Arc. This is where some cave explorers back in 1994 discovered a cave with 30,000 year old cave paintings made by the earliest humans. The cave had been untouched as the opening was sealed by a landslide  20,000 years ago.  If this was just a trip for me I could have spent a week just visiting wineries as it was also in the middle of the region where Cotes d' Rhone is produced.

Getting a last minute inexpensive hotel was a challenge as it was peak season for the tourists in the area.  We managed to find two rooms in a hotel just outside one of the towns.  When we arrived we discovered the rooms were far from each other and when Crista used her broken French to see if we could find rooms closer together the receptionist showed us a third option, a gite.  A gite is like renting a home.  We've also seen them as cabins as well.  The hotel had two gites and the available one was a two bedroom with a/c, kitchen and washing machine for the same price.  We took the gite an did at least 4 loads of laundry and utilized the clothesline to dry in the hot sunny air.

With the caves,  the challenge was to preserve the 30,000 year old art but to share it with the public.  The solution was to build a complete reproduction of the caves with the art and keep the original cave sealed except for research. This museum had been open for less than a year. It felt a little Disney-like knowing what we were looking at was fake but they did an incredible job making it realistic.

Afterwards we drove down to the site where the original cave was located to see the other attraction next to the cave; a rock formation which creates a natural arch over the river called the Pont D'Arc. Kayaks go down the Ardeche river to go under the arch.  There is also beach access so we parked and the boys went swimming under the arch for a hour.