Retournac, a town on the Loire in Auvergne

On our last day in the Le Puy area, we decided to drive up to the town called Yssingeaux (pop. 7,000). I had read that it was interesting as an example of a very old town in a remote area in mountainous country, and it's only half an hour's drive from Le Puy. Well, it was kind of a bust. Everything seemed to be under construction or restoration, with scaffolding and tarps on many buildings. It was crowded with people and cars, with no place to park the car, and the prospect of walking around it the town with the dog on a leash didn't seem attractive. So we turned around fast and just went driving. Walt looked at the map and said maybe we should drive down the gorge that the Loire River runs through as it flows north from Le Puy.

It was a pretty drive. The weather was cold and a little windy, so it wasn't conducive to taking a long walk on a hiking trail or along the river. Then we came to a town called Retournac (pop. 3,000), which I hadn't read about or even heard of. It's a town located on the banks of the Loire and it's also on the rail line that links Le Puy to the larger city of Saint-Étienne and on to Lyon, Paris, and Marseille. Retournac turns out to be a little mountain resort town where people come to spend their summer vacations hiking, boating, and relaxing.

I made nine photos I took there into the slideshow above. You can see the town and the river, the bridge across the Loire, and the town's at least partially Romanesque church, which is built out of what the Michelin Guide calls pierre d'une coloration jaune, with un clocher massif (a massive bell tower), and a roof made of lauzes — flat stones cut from sedimentary rock like limestone or sandstone. I pushed the door of the church open to see the inside, but it was very dark in there and a woman who was praying, I think, looked startled by the sudden light that shone in through the doorway. I quitely closed the door and moved on. The hilltop ruins you see in one photo are just outside of the town and show what is left of the Château d'Artias, which stands far above the river and is one of the oldest fortifications in the region. It was built in the 11th century and construction went on for 70 years. It fell into ruin at the time of the French Revolution.

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Back to another subject: a couple of mornings ago, I was out walking Natasha when the little dog that lives three houses down came flying out of its owners' house, barking wildly. The neighbors' front gate was open. The young woman who lives there with her husband came running out behind their dog, trying to get him to come back into the yard.

We talked for a minute or two. She told me she is expecting her second child later this year. I remarked that her recently deceased next-door neighbor's house now has a for sale sign on the front gate. Yes, she said, I found the ad for it on the internet.

Do you know why the man's daughter and husband burned so much of his furniture when they cleaned out the house? Yes, she said, I talked to the daughter and asked her. We were very shocked by that incident, she added. The man had a nice house with a lot of perfectly good pieces of furniture. I agreed. I asked her what his daughter had to say about it all. The young neighbor woman (I don't even know her name — French people often don't share that information) said the explanation was that the daughter and her husband didn't want to have to make a lot of trips over to the déchetterie (the dump/recycling center) to get rid of everything, so they just burned it all.

All the neighbors I've talked to about the way this was done have expressed shock and dismay, remarking that with so many people in need, why would the family decide to burn everything? Why didn't they run an ad, open up the house, and just let people come and get what they wanted or needed? Sometimes it's hard to understand what people do, and why.