Sunday 4 October - Ceret

[Photos: Chateau d'Aubiry, Ceret]

 

We had an excellent day out in the Tech Valley, being the next one south of the Tet Valley where Prades and Villefranche are situated. We intend coming this way again with Sandy & Lynette so were only planning on a quick look, with a trip to the archaeological museum in Ceret.

 

Our first stop was unplanned. We saw off to our right an amazing chateau, a real Disneyland wonder, complete with at least three rotting iron-framed summerhouses. Looking it up later, it turns out it was the imposing 2500m² 108m long Chateau D-Aubiry built in 1900 for the French inventor of cigarette paper. It looked splendid, though it was sad to see the summerhouses falling apart. We went off the main road for a detour to look at it, then on to Ceret.

 

This turned out to be a most attractive medium-sized town. We headed up the main street, with huge plane trees overhead looking for the archaeological museum, only to find it was closed despite having hours on the door which should have had it open. Kept wandering through the town and looking about. For the second time this trip I befouled my sandals on one of the ubiquitous dog turds – in general they have not been too bad, and at least the older towns like Ceret all have public taps which I was able to use. At least the French dogs seem way quieter than Italians ones, which were particularly loud and frequent at Ceriana. Why people have these silly little dogs in towns is beyond us. Some are smaller than cats. We watched in amusement at a story taking place on a balcony. A little dog was on the balcony floor, and a cat was sitting on a chair above, just casually reaching down now and again to swipe the dogs head with her claws. Such deliberate torture.

 

We found ourselves liking Ceret. It had plenty of shops, nice bright wide streets, and a pleasant feel to it. Found one place a vendre which we liked the look of, so took a photo of the sign in case we felt like ringing up later. The people were again so nice. I caught the eye of one man out walking, said bonjour as you do, and he stopped and shook my hand before carrying on. We bought some nice food for dinner from a boucherie (tabouli, cuttlefish salad, celery juliette salad) and headed back home, still wondering if it is possible to buy cheaply.

 

On our way back into Laroque, we stumbled across a fair, which Valerie had told us about, but we had forgotten. It was basically a bring-and-buy car-boot sale. An awful load of rubbish, much dating from the 70s. Great if you liked that era, or wanted glassware, but not a lot of any interest to us, so back to our house.

 

Looked at websites for cheap houses in this area, and were surprised to find that there were a few. We really don’t want to go much further north, as it gets too hot in summer on the flats, also we don’t want to be on the flats anyway. So were are reduced to checking out departmente Pyrenees-Oriental – number 66 in the French system. Went for our loop walk again at 6pm.