Monday 12 October - Carcassonne

[Photos: Carcassonne]

 

Our revisit of Carcassonne was a great success, after a gap of over 27 years. The day didn't augur well, with a strong wind (we presume it is the tramontane) from the northwest, and drizzly grey skies. We chose to set the GPS to allow toll roads to speed up the 1.5-2 hour trip. Good choice. It was very gusty, hard work driving, and would have been far worse on the narrower and more heavily-trafficked normal highway. The toll road has a speed limit of 130kmh, but I kept below that as the wind was fierce. The toll at 10€ was rather more than we expected.

 

Arrived about 10:30, parked and headed into the old city through the Narbonne (NE) gate. Unfortunately the way we came in, we couldn't see the old city until we were right on it, whereas arriving from the railway station all this years ago we could see the amazing profile of all the towers as we approached. The temperature was down at 18, the wind still strong, and as we had left Laroque with clear skies, we had no warm gear with us. Thankfully our Goretex shells were in the boot, so at least we had some protection from the wind.

 

Carcassonne was just great. Our memories of it from last time were pretty hazy, mainly prompted by the four slides we took back then. How photography has changed. This time I took about 100 photos, almost all of which were better than the Kodachrome 64/Pentax ME Super SLR efforts of 1982, yet that was a pretty flash combination. Not only better, but our Panasonic TZ camera is way smaller, no doubt cheaper in real terms, and basically free to run. We paid to go through the main chateau, which was excellent and had a lot of panels explaining what we saw. By the time we had finished, it was quite late for lunch.

 

We stopped off at a café and had a very tasty ham and cheese roll. Being France, it wasn't mild or Colby, but a nice gruyere. We found our way to the cathedral where we had an amazing experience. The church itself is a stunning gothic creation, with a great forest of columns at the front, and lovely gothic rib vaulting above. The stained glass windows were some of the best we have seen, and I was able to photograph them pretty well. So the setting was special to begin with, but as we were looking about, a 5-voice Russian male choir started singing. They were superb, with a falsetto countertenor and an extraordinarily deep bass. The combination of the setting, the excellent acoustics and the beautiful singing made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It would be enough to make anyone take up religion. We so enjoyed it, we bought the CD.

 

We found our way back through the streets via a number of excellent artists' shops, then finished our visit with a trip around part of the main ramparts. We seem to remember from last time walking pretty much around the whole walled city, but this time only about half the ramparts were available to visit.

 

The bastide or old town outside the walls looked to have a few interesting places to see, but on going down to see it we found it looking very tired, and the places impossible to find. However the views back to the old city across the Aude river were excellent.

 

Going back home, we were going to go back to the ordinary roads, but in the end decided the shorter time was worth the money. Much easier travelling with the wind behind us, and also I remembered to fire up the cruise control. It seems very odd whipping along at 130kmh. We had to stop off at Argeles to pick up a replacement ink cartridge for our hosts as we had used theirs to print the book out. Unfortunately this meant a long slow drag through Perpignan. Just as important, my undies had disintegrated and needed replacement!

 

Fired up the barbecue for dinner, though not without incident. It was pitch dark, and Sandy hadn't noticed the BBQ brush inside the back of it. After a bit there was a yell from downstairs – the pile of leaves under the BBQ had caught on fire. The hose nearby did the trick, and it turned out that the plastic brush had melted and dripped, burning, down below the BBQ! Not to worry. A bit of a burnoff and it was all tidied up. The Catalan sausage we had bought for dinner was superb, with eggplant, onion, pepper and courgettes on the side.