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  • Day 32

    A quiet day in Carcassonne

    September 24, 2017 in France ⋅ ☀️ 27 °C

    By this time, we'd explored most of the interesting parts of Carcassonne on foot and wanted to find out about areas further afield, Fabro, our host on the river cruise, comes from this area and had already given us a list of must-see places. Some are accessible by public transport, but there are others which can reach only by car.

    We thought that the logical place to start would be the tourist office in this tourist-oriented town, so we fronted up there just as the doors were opening at 10am. The first thing the girl told us was that one needs a car in order to explore the area. Well, thanks for nothing. We explained our predicament, but she couldn't get rid of us quickly enough, throwing some place-names, a couple of railway timetables and a map at us before turning away to serve the next customer. What we did establish was that train services on a Sunday are almost non-existent in that neck of the woods, though that part didn't worry us since we were prepared to go on the Monday or Tuesday.

    We then wandered off to find the Gourmet Market, but that turned out to be a bit of a fizzer, with only about a dozen stalls of nothing very exciting. The previous day's produce market had been far more interesting. It was a fine warm day, so were happy to sit in the square watching the world go by.

    However one can't spend the whole day doing that, so we booked ourselves onto a 2.5 hour boat trip on the Canal du Midi, which runs through the town. These days, the 240km canal carries only tourist traffic, but when it was built in the 1600s it was a major part of the trade link in France from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. It is a major engineering feat, with 91 locks and some very cunning engineering to keep it navigable along its entire length. Anyway, the trip was very interesting and very picturesque, For the most part we travelled in heavily wooded areas with no signs of civilisation. During Napoleon's time large stretches were planted with plane trees, which are now very mature. Their roots play a major part in preventing erosion of the canal walls. A quiet but enjoyable day, indeed.

    On Sundays in Carcassonne most businesses, including restaurants, are closed. Knowing that the restaurants in the immediate vicinity are crowded most nights, we decided that it would be prudent to book for our Sunday night meal. A place we'd been recommended was the Jardin de L'Été, a couple of hundred metres from the hotel. This we did, and as it was shaping up to be a mild night, after a very warm day, we asked for a table in the aforementioned jardin. Per our booking, we arrived at 8pm and were ushered outside to a pleasant walled garden, paved with coarse gravel and at least the size of two tennis courts. It was already quite full, and we could see that the one and only waitress was being run off her feet. There were a couple of large groups, more of that in a moment, and it was a long time between visits to our table to deliver the menu, take our orders, deliver them and so forth. In fact it was approaching 11pm before we finally finished. By then, it was getting quite chilly and we were longing for our hotel room. Our waitress was most apologetic. It seems that the owner had decided to open the garden on the Sunday night as a trial and had been overwhelmed by the response. It wasn't the fault of our poor waitress who'd been running herself ragged serving meals across this large gravelled area.

    It's probably just as well that we were outside because two of the groups were very noisy. We'd heard already that Carcassonne is a popular place for the English, both for holidays and as a place to retire to. Certainly we heard more regional pommy accents in and around Carcassonne, including in our little hotel, than anything else. That was in contrast to the other parts of France we visited where the English-speaking tourists were mainly Canadians and Americans. Anyway, Brian came to the conclusion that the group of loud pommy males was a load of bus-drivers from Birmingham, while the other large table, of about eight couples comprised fruit shop owners and their wives from 'uddersfield. Turning all of that into a running joke certainly helped the time go by for we two impatient hungry travellers.

    Was it worth the wait? Probably not, though we knew that after the magnificent meals on Le Phenicien everything else was going to seem pretty ordinary.
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