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Like last trip, our "rest days" aren't turning out to be so restful. Unlike last trip, this time I have a FitBit to prove it!
We started the morning by walking down to the train station via the "new" (15th - 19th centuries) town. We walked by the canal and figured out where all the day cyclists were coming from. I'll take the one with AstroTurf!
It was Sunday, so most of the shops, including this one, with the ramp de fromage, were closed.
The main cathedral is also closed, but services were underway at this church, which seems to be getting a full refurb.
Lots of new gargoyles
And the retired ones.
We had lunch on our street, at a friendly place called La Passage. We forgot the camera, luckily for you, because Eric had duck breast. I had a salad with gazpacho, langostines, jambon and cheese. We both played with the cute dog that was running around in the place.
In the afternoon we headed up to La Cite, the really really old town inside the fortifications. The lowlight was that the old town is now jam-packed with tourists and the ticky tacky tchotchke shops that serve them. It is still picturesque, but perhaps a Tuesday evening might have been a bit more evocative than Sunday afternoon.
The highlight is seeing the castle. Fortifications began in Roman times, the first castle was build in the 12th century, and the whole thing completed in the 13th and 14th. It fell into disrepair over the centuries (free stones!), but was lovingly -- and a bit creatively -- restored over the second half of the 19th century.
These wooden things are called "hoards," we learned. I already knew that soldiers used them to drop rocks and boiling oil on Invaders. (Mon dieu!)
Eric amongst the hoards
The whole thing has an inner and outer defensive wall. Here we are going to walk along the inner one.
Great view down into the kinda old town.
The views of the art installation were cool from up here.
Through an arrow slit.
There's a Cathedral inside the fortifications. I guess you really need a place to pray if you are under siege.
It has "the nicest stained glass windows in Southern France" (according to the Carcassonne tourist office.)
And a small museum of statuary recovered from the ruins.
The town itself, while festooned with ice cream and t shirt shops, has some impressively old architecture.
The specialty of the area is :
That didn't really appeal on a warm May evening, so we had a quick dinner at a tourist dive that I am too embarrassed to name or photograph.
An aside - we found a map that shows why we are struggling with the wind. See that green band that runs across the southwest part of France? That's where the wind from the Atlantic gets funnelled through the mountains, and coincidentally what we have been trying to bike through. (Aside: the other narrow green funnel farther East is what we biked through last time...)
We have resolved our predicament by deciding to take a train to Toulouse tomorrow, where we will have another rest day before resuming our ride.
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