- Carcassone - lots of walls, soft bread and a feisty spider
- Fumel - its got the Lot. "Le mansion" and le walk de la forrest.
- Day trips to le petit, jolie et chateau-filled villages
CARCASSONE
Gorgeous walled town in the south of France near the Spanish border - thats all we knew before we got there. "kids will love it - looks like a fairytale".
And it does.
Especially if you get there at dusk as we did.
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| Look at them turrets |
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| Foreboding skies |
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| 4 midgets prepare to storm the castle walls |
So... Carcassone is pretty touristy - wasn't prepared for quite how much as its kind of hard to get to. They have 3 large carparks around the perimeter and also spillover carparks for the busy days - but it also has a really interesting history so I got to learn some cool stuff while we were there...
First the Gauls were here and then the Romans and both built fortifications to defend this hilltop spot overlooking the strategic Aude River. There were also Visigoths, Moors and Franks involved apparently, but I'm not even sure who they were to be honest, so I'll skip to the Cathars - who I had never heard of before I arrived but seem quite important to this part of the world.
The Cathars were a religious sect. They believed that humans were in fact the embodiment of the everlasting stuggle between good and evil and that evil was, in fact, winning. They believed that unless you underwent a "ceremony" to put you on the road to redemption and then practiced various forms of denial - sex, meat, and comfort in general and were also lucky enough to have already been reincarnated several times on your road to free-ing your spirit from its temporal chains you were basically "bad". For some unfathomable reason the sect gained considerable popularity throughout a lot of Europe - notably the north of Spain and the south of France - "Cathar Land" or "le Pays Cathar" right through the 11th and 12th Century.
Meanwhile the church in Rome was practicing "material gain" rather than denial and did not appreciate the snooty way the Cathar dudes were talking about them. In 1208 Pope (not so) Innocent III was so annoyed he pronounced a "crusade" was the best way to remove the thorn from his side and offered up the land held by any Cathar sympathisers to any who would fight the Cathars. Cheeky sod. Not too hard to imagine who won.
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| Cathars being shown the door - before they were burned |
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| Doesn't seem a fair fight |
Carcassone was one of the main Cathar strongholds and a bunch of well armed fellows from the north of France liked the look of the castle and laid seige. It wasn't ever going to end well, but some brutal, gruesome and underhanded stuff went on and in the end the Pope was pleased.
Subsequently the french painted lots of pictures about it and now the castle is intact again and has had a makeover infact and you can wander about and buy chocolates and fairy floss and nougat and wooden swords there.
It was our first chance to be tourists in France and Lorry and I were thinking our high school french from 1994 would somehow stand us in good stead. Not so. In the first shop we entered I haltering asked for directions and then half way through smiled and asked (in french) if the lady behind the counter spoke English (it being a major tourist centre and all). She smiled and said (in excellent English) "I speak English but you must speak French. You are IN France". I was put in my place.
Our American compadres have amongst them an excellent spanish speaker and although she was concerned about not speaking any french at all, it turns out she's a natural and quickly had the necessary phrases for "where is the toilet?" and "how much is that?" and "a glass of wine please" down pat.
So on arriving in Carcassone we found a restaurant that didn't blanche at the sight of 4 kids and 4 non-parlez-ing adults (3 of whom are vegetarian) - they cleverly put us out the back in the garden - and we sat down for a french meal. Zoe tried the cassoulet which is a dense casserole of sorts with meat and white beans which she gallantly attempted to finish. French onion soup for Lorry and me - and it was delish. Darkness does not descend at this time of year until about 9.30 so you can very easily lose track of how late its getting but it also means we weren't driving through the streets in the dark looking for our hotel which was probably a good thing.
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| "french restaurant" |
We stayed at an AMAZING place. A 300 year old vineyard, now B&B, run by a fabulously warm, smily and welcoming couple. Room sizes are dictated to some extent by the age of the building and its original purpose and the Dembos definitely got lucky and ended up with the big room. Massive even.
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| This is only half the room - windows facing three ways and ancient beams overhead. Kids making paper aeroplanes |
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| complete with fancy bathroom! |
Breakfast was served at a huge wooden communal table next morning and consisted of the softest bread rolls I have ever eaten, huge saucer-cups of milky coffee, fresh pastries and juice, cheeses, home-made jams and our pathetic attempts to speak french with the owners. Luckily there was another couple staying there who were properly bilingual and came to our aid.
Outside the kids found an extraordinary act of nature underway in the garden after breakfast. Some enormous black shiny beetle had flown into a spiders web and to the delight of the spider could not escape. So we all watched in awe as the spider ran hither and thither around the beetle (that was at least 5 times its size) tending to the web to make sure the ropes were all fastened securely and adding bits where necessary and then kept coming back to the beetle and jabbing it in the head. "Ner ner ner ner ner!!" or spidery words to that affect. We took a stack of photos but they are all terrible. Have only put in one here to remind us.
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| Reckon the spider is STILL feeding off that meal |
Drew was given a book of 200 paper aeroplanes by our new travelling partners and he and Grady and Zoe took the sheer number on as some kind of challenge. I think they made up about 30 in half an hour and then there were just paper aeroplanes everywhere you looked - in the air, flying out of windows, in the car and squashed at the bottom of bags. I stashed the book. It was a corker of a present, but it was in everyone's best interest that they stopped flying through the car as Lorry drove around. There'll be more to fold when we get home.
Back in Carcassone the next day we spent the morning exploring the winding streets, the ramparts, the nougat and the castle proper... and then we were back in the cars and off to our home for the next few days in the town of Fumel. Probably should include a bit of a map... but first here's us taking over Carcassone for a few hours.
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| Note the feet... and the paper plane in hand |
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| Exploring the Ramparts - think I spot some Crusaders... |
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| Crusaders! (note the paper aeroplane mid flight!) |
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| I'm fairly sure the RSPCA should be told about this |
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| Le shoppe de lollies |
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| No comment required |
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| Zoe (now apparently aged 18) and Tilda sharing a moment |
BIT OF A MAP...
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| About 6 hours driving... |
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| ...or to give it some perspective... |
FUMEL
Little town/village on the Lot River (cousin to the Dordogne River) and our base for exploring the south of France and kicking back a little. Quite a lot of effort went into securing this location it must be said. More than anywhere else on the whole trip in fact. It was a multi-national search with a vast chain of websites being trawled and consulted, reviewed and re-visited. And a special thanks to Granny Jacquie at the outset for providing us with the information needed to even start our search.
We booked a large house on the outskirts of Fumel sitting on about 2 acres of land. 2 storeys with 4 bedrooms and a large kitchen, big dining and sitting rooms and even a pool with quite freezing water in it. There was an enormous garden to explore and the kids got to know each other with treasure hunts, hide and seek, more paper-planes and outside stuff....
So for a week we could cook our own food, do laundry whenevere we felt like it, spread out a bit and have the luxury of outside space for kids without concerns about traffic or strangers or getting lost etc. (the pool had a very cool alarm on it which would sound if anything larger than a tennis ball hit the water). We had our own personal, quite uptight, landlord type person who attended to ant infestations and pool issues and reminded us to close the shutters every time we left the house and also brought us a birthday cake for Pradeep's birthday. As an aside, she is also training for the Winter Olympics cross country ski event - competing for Czech. And she takes a nice photo.
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| Other side of the house |
Day Trips...
Fumel itself is not a gorgeous town, but did give us access to a lot of lovely places around.
We organised a trip to the Thursday markets in the next town along where Zoe bought fresh spices to make an amazing Shakshuka one night with tomatoes and farm eggs and french bread.
We visited Saint Cirque Lapopie (voted (correctly) as the prettiest village in France last year) and Cahors - famous for its C13th bridge.
We took a scenic stroll along one of the thousands of marked walks in the area - following the signs and markers to complete a 5 km walk through fields and an oak and juniper forrest with boxwood and lichens, past little houses and even via a fois gras farm - to quench our thirst and learn a little about goose livers.
We took a day trip north through the towns of Biron (to a Cinderella castle) Monpazier (just because it has a great name) Belves where we found a little market with great dips where we also had lunch, nearly to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (another tres french name) to see the amazing cave paintings of mammoths and horses and reindeer and bison painted 14,000 years ago - but closed on Saturdays. We ventured on to Sarlat which is another very pretty walled town with a lot of history but overrun with touristos and then headed to La Roque Gageac a town literally built into the side of a cliff where we pulled on our raincoats and tried to climb a bit, but were beaten back by the weather into the safety of a crepe-making cafe. Mmmmmmm
Here's the story in pictures....
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| Belves Market |
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