Carcasonne & the Christmas Markets

We had a rough nights sleep in the car park. We were joined by the local boy racers at 9:30pm doing handbrake turns and beeping there horns which was intimidating and annoying, and despite every review we had read stating that the trains stopped at 10pm they didn’t. And to make it worse from 10:30pm every train that passed beeped it’s horn until 1:30am.
We decided to take the toll roads to Carcasonne as it was 2 hours quicker but only 7 miles shorter as we were both knackered.
Our first option for parking was a vineyard farm stay but the ground was unbelievably sloping and they had a dog in a kennel barking it’s head off and there were no services so after lunch I decided to move and we parked in our usual spot at Le Cite Aire du camping car, this cost us an extra €14 but that’s because Ellie said we had a 3rd person with us accidentally but here we have water, it’s flat and there’s no barking dogs.
We chilled out in the afternoon and grabbed a quick nap, then after dinner we walked into the new town to see the Christmas lights and the market which opened today.
As we walked into the park we could see the stalls and all the Christmas stuff was out but nothing was lit up. I thought I had completely screwed up and just as we were about to leave the park suddenly all the Christmas lights came on.
It was amazing. It actually looked and felt like Christmas was coming. The lights looked spectacular and all the animatronics were moving. From the park we walked up to La Bastade, the centre of town and then Christmas really hit us.
Here there were loads of market stalls in a huge square, an inner square where the craft items were sold and an outer square around that where food and drink was sold. Then at the centre of it all was a huge ice rink. We had mold wine and it was super good.
Once we were done with the markets we took a long walk back to Wanda via the medieval city which was open but there were no people and I really wished I had taken my proper camera.
Walking the deserted streets was eerie and strange as it felt like we shouldn’t have been there and in the past we had to fight our way through the crowds.
After a lap of the medieval city we took the route back along the river path in the dark which was creepy and we were glad to get back to Wanda as the temperature was dropping fast. We had just walked 7.5km.Baca selengkapnya