Thursday, July 13th, continued: After Queribus, we kept driving northeast. The roads were narrow and curvy just like before, but we had an hour and 45 minutes before we reached our next destination, which was the restored castle at Carcassonne. The countryside was rugged and beautiful. Scooching to the very edge of the world/road to let giant vehicles pass us head-on was not so fun. But the views! The flowers! We saw half a dozen other Cathar Fortresses dotted along the tops of other hills as we drove. Officially they’re called chateaux, but come on. Versailles and Chambord are chateaux. Cathar country—le pays de Cathar—has fortress ruins. Due to our late start in the morning, we were starving long before we reached Carcassonne.
After about an hour of curvy winding narrow roads, we started looking for somewhere to stop for lunch. It was an extremely remote unpopulated area with tiny, rustic villages and hamlets scattered every couple dozen kilometers. None of them seemed to have any visible/obvious food source. At last we reached the slightly larger village of Lagrasse, and saw several cafes as we followed signs for public parking. Lagrasse’s welcome sign proclaimed it one of the “Villes Plus Beaux de France”, which we knew to mean that the shutters would be painted, flowers would be blooming, and the town would look extra cute.
As we walked along the sidewalk, we read a few posted menus and selected a café for a very late lunch. It was 1pm when we sat down among a sidewalk crowded with full tables, the people buzzing in French while they ate a leisurely lunch under giants shade umbrellas. We waited for our menus. Then we waited for water. We waited for our orders to be taken. We waited for our food. All in all, we waited for 90 minutes—an hour and a half—to get our food! It was a very bustling busy café, but we were so hungry!! I practically could’ve caught and cooked my salmon in that time, haha. We finished eating and left a little after 2:30pm.
Before getting back in the car for the final 40 minute drive into Carcassonne, we decided to go for a walk around Lagrasse. It was an excellent decision, because the village was adorable. Rustic doorways, narrow streets, flowers in all the right places, with an ancient abbey towering above the buildings. And the town itself was very quiet--we hardly saw any other people as we walked through the silent stone streets. I took a lot of pictures. When we crossed a bridge to the abbey, we saw a swimming area dammed off in the river. That's were the people were, cooling off in the heat of the day.
Jeff started getting drowsy during the last 20 minutes of the drive to Carcassonne, so I took a turn at the wheel. I drove on the narrow country road for a bit, but then emerged onto busy city streets. Neither one of those two options are within my comfort zone, but I survived and somehow parked in a narrow parking garage in Carcassonne. The purpose of our pilgrimage to Carcassonne was to revisit a site that we loved when we backpacked around Europe right after college 15 years ago. Our goal was to look at the iconic castle walls and turrets, and recreate the picture we took in front of it 15 years ago.
We walked up up up to the restored Cite de Carcassonne and looked around for a bit before feeling done with the many touristy shops and cafes that were open inside the walls. We weren’t in the mood to pay entrance to go inside the castle itself because we had already done that 15 years ago and it was fine, but not worth repeating, especially since we have so many chateaux that we love more. So we set about finding the same spot that we took our picture 15 years ago. It took a while to hunt it down, because we had to go across the river and under a bridge to get to the right spot. The trees had grown so much in the intervening 15 years that the shot wasn’t exactly the same, but it was pretty close. I forgot to bring my tripod, though, so we had to use the ten second timer and prop Jeff’s phone up on some rocks using his wallet as a teepee for it to lean on. After much trial and error, it worked!
After that sweaty challenge, we walked back to the parking garage and Jeff drove our rental car back to Millas. We took a high speed straight-shot toll highway and got back much faster than our scenic outbound route. We stopped in Perpignan to get a few groceries and toilet paper. (Our Airbnb gave us about a third of one roll of TP, and no more! Stingy!) Back in our secluded (wifi-less) rustic cottage Airbnb, we ate baguette, fromage, sausisse (sausage), and cherry tomatoes for dinner. We drank grape juice and tropical Oasis in wine glasses. For dessert we had divine strawberry tarts. It was a wonderful first full day in southwestern France.
1 comment:
Impressively clean streets in that quiet town!
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