A&G Off to France--Day Seven (Part 2 of 3)

(See below first, or pretend you're watching Memento.)

After some souvenir buying, as we have to have some faience (we go for a non-traditional pattern, of course), we hit the road to the Gorge. First stop is where the Gorge pours into Lac de Ste.-Croix, where the water is so blue it seems unreal. It just seems wrong water should be so clean anywhere in the world in the 21st century. But it is, so much so it motivates me to offer you a photo of Amy and me (I'm on the left) at the lake:

The drive then winds above the lake for awhile, a study in aqua, until you get to another sleepy lovely town on a hillside, Aguines, although this one is sleepier than most until a dog, luckily chained up, sort of lunges at me and I didn't even provoke him (I save all of that teasing for our two dogs). What's worse, they have a horrible bee problem in Aguine:
So we head off to experience the canyon. Since we're there off season we don't have to join what sounds like a summer-long convoy if the guidebooks can be trusted. Instead, it's a handful of cars, hundreds of feet of drop, a billion of leaves, and so many photo-ops my shutter finger almost seizes up just remembering it. FYI, the road isn't as scary as I feared it might be, thanks to the mighty Mercedes, the lack of traffic, and so many opportunities to pull over and take it all in. The tunnel in one spot is narrow enough to seem threatening, but we're having too good a time to even care about head-ons. Now that's vacation relaxation.

And the tales of Day Seven will continue in another post, so there can be more photos.