Cherries, cathedrals, and celebrations

Day 10 France 2012

Leon and I had to go shopping this morning to refill our larder since Caroline and Dave were coming in tonight.  We had not been to the tiny market in the village, so went there to buy bread for breakfast and to check it out.  We bought a few things there and decided we needed to go to the next town which has a little larger market and to buy gas.  This village has no gas station.  On the way back, we passed a cherry orchard with a roadside stand that had been closed until today, so we stopped and bought two different kinds of cherries.

We came back and unloaded our stash, and drove down to Narbonne.  There is a train station there and Caroline and Dave were coming in on the train from Girona.  They had been to Barcelona for a couple of days, then went to Girona, and were joining us for a few days before going back to Barcelona.  We found the train station and decided we had plenty of time to go into the center of town to see the cathedral before the train arrived.

The Cathedral in Narbonne is part of a large complex of buildings that for the most part have been de-consecrated and now form a museum and municipal buildings.  The building sits on the site of a church from the fourth  century.  In 1272, the Pope (who had been archbishop in Narbonne) decided to build a cathedral there.  As it turns out, the whole cathedral was not built, just the choir.  The building is huge.  I can’t imagine how large it would have been if it had been finished.  You can tell from looking at it that the building is unfinished because there is a bricked up wall and there are beautiful stone window frames in unfinished walls.  It would have meant demolishing part of the city walls to complete the cathedral, so they just stopped.

There is a city square with sidewalk cafes outside the municipal building, so we sat out there to enjoy a cold drink and watch the people go by.  You can’t tell it, but I am sitting at a table in this crowd of people.

We went back to the train station and waited for Caroline and Dave to arrive.  We were so excited to see them…bisous (air kisses) all around, and then Caroline pulled her hand out of her pocked to show off the beautiful engagement ring that Dave had given her when they were in Barcelona.  We were so excited for them.  The ring is a beautiful yellow diamond surrounded by smaller white diamonds with additional diamonds across the top of the band.  The sides and back of the ring are beautifully hand engraved, and it makes the ring look like an antique.  Dave did a great job of choosing the perfect ring for Caroline.  We are proud that he will be part of our family.

There was much conversation on the drive back as they told us about Barcelona and Girona, and we told them of our adventures in France. 

We could hardly wait to show our little French house to them.  

 We gave them a quick tour, then sat down on our little patio to a wonderful dinner of roasted chicken, leftover boeuf bourguignon and potatoes, delicious French cheeses and breads, tiny radishes, foie gras, and, of course, the celebratory wine.  For dessert, we ate a ton of the juicy cherries that Leon and I had bought earlier in the day and the macaroons from St. Emilion that I had been saving..   I don’t think I got a single photo of the table.

We came inside and washed the dishes and sat in our little living room with a glass of calvados (apple brandy).  Powerful stuff!  It was a late night for us since we had so many things to talk about.

The Black Mountains, Cathar ruins, and the Canal du Midi…again

Day 9 France 2012

This part of France was home in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries to a religious group called the Cathars.  Leon likes to call them the first Protestants, but they were a group who believed that life was a battle between good (spiritual) and bad (material).  They considered material things evil and of the devil.  They focused on the teachings of St. John and believed in only baptism as a sacrament.  They also believed in reincarnation and were vegetarians.  You can imagine that the Pope and the Catholic church were not happy with them  

The King of France wanted to consolidate his power over the southern part of France, and the Pope needed to make a strong statement that the only acceptable Christianity was the Roman Catholic style.  These two men joined forces to wipe out the Cathars, and over the course of a generation, they managed to massacre, torture, and burn at the stake every single Cathar in France.  The castles and towns that were home to the Cathars were destroyed, and as we drove around the towns of Lastours and Minerve, we could see the haunting ruins of their fortresses still standing.  

These photos are from Lastours:

 Minerve, another Cathar town, was not on a mountain top but was sculpted out of a rugged canyon gorge. 

The tall tower on the left is all that remains from the original Cathar city.

 There is a river that has cut huge tunnels through the mountain under the town.

The Black Mountains are to the north of the town where we are staying.  We programmed Helen to take us to one of the Cathar towns, and she decided to take us on some of the most narrow mountain roads we have ever been on.  It was sort of like the Pig Trail, except one lane and much higher mountains.  There were lots of hairpin curves, and these mountains were so high that the tops were covered with evergreen trees.  There was a distinctive tree line.  Sometimes we found an Alpine type meadow covered in beautiful wild flowers.  From the tops of the mountains, we could see the Pyrenees.  As we came over the mountains, we noticed that the southwestern side of the mountains was dry while the northeastern side of the mountains was lush and green with the beautiful River Grave running through.  There were tiny little villages up in the mountains, and we wondered how they managed to live so far from civilization.  We were definitely in the French Boonies!  At one point, Helen said we were on an “unpaved road.”  Yep, we were on a gravel/dirt road.  That was when Leon said that he was going to get out the map and find his own way and to heck with Helen’s shortcut over the mountain.

We stopped at Homps on the way back where the Canal du Midi has a big intersection.  There were dozens of really fancy canal boats lined up on the sides of the canal.  This little town has canal boat tours from here.  There are little sidewalk cafes all along so that you can  get something to eat and drink and sit and watch the boats coming and going up and down the canal.  

Today was a holiday in France…Pentecost.  Everything was closed, even the large grocery stores.  Luckily our cupboard was full, and we had plenty of gas in the car.  Tomorrow we will need to stock up again.

Something we noticed today was that the stop signs here have STOP (in English) on them.  They may have always been like that, but we never realized it until today.

Resting, eating, and doing laundry

Day 8 France 2012

This was our lazy day.  We slept late and decided to just stay home, do laundry, read, and regroup from our busy week.  We had bought sausage and eggs at the market last night, so Leon made a pot of coffee, I made a pot of tea, and we cooked sausage and eggs for breakfast. We had bought milk and juice, and had a good American breakfast.  Milk is hard to come by in France.  They eat yogurt and cheese, but don’t drink much milk.  It was interesting trying to choose which of the bottles contained milk.  Once when we were in France with Jason and Cara, we thought we were getting milk, but bought a nice bottle of cream.

Doing laundry with a French washer and dryer is an experience, too.  Our landlady had set the dials on the washer so that we would just have to put detergent in and turn it on.  The real problem came when it was time to do load 2 because the dials reset at the end of the cycle.  We know that water came in and clothes swished around and then the spin cycle came on, so we assume that the clothes got washed.  We bought detergent yesterday when we bought groceries.  Did you know that the market did not have Tide or Cheer?  There are so many American products on the shelves here (Kellog’s, Oreos, and even Pringles) but there were no American brands of detergent at all.  We bought a box of something that had a picture of clothes on the box and just hoped for the best.   The washer is on the second floor and the dryer is in the garage next door.  The dryer is not a vented dryer, and the water from the clothes collects in a plastic tub that has to be emptied after each load of clothes.

We had bought a roasted chicken at the market yesterday.  The house has an oven that looks like a microwave, but no microwave.  We heated up the chicken and some of the vegetables from last night’s dinner, sliced some good French bread, and feasted.  There was also leftover sticky toffee pudding, so we had that.  Leon is now watching BBC news while he samples some of the calvados we bought earlier in the trip.

After dinner, we took another orientation walking tour of the town.  Down by the river there is a huge plot that appears to be a community garden. 

We saw another house with roses over the door like our house has.

 

  Down by the Square de la Republique there is another huge plane tree.  The park is from 1789, and I think that maybe the tree was planted about then.  The closest street is called Rue de Martyrs. 

  Tomorrow is another national holiday, so most of the shops will be closed. We plan to see some of the surrounding area.

Vineyards, the Canal du Midi, and home sweet home

Day 7 France 2012

We drove back toward St. Emilion and took more photos of the vineyards and chateaus around the area.  It was cloudy and misty when we started out.  I got out to take some close up shots of the grape vines and noticed that there are baby grapes forming.

The roses here are in full bloom and it seems that everyone has them in their yard.  We noticed them yesterday, too, and they are just beautiful.  We passed fields of newly baled hay all wrapped in plastic.  They looked like huge marshmallows.  Next we passed acre after acre of fruit trees covered in netting.  We think that they are cherries.  The weather got better the farther we drove, and by noon was sunny again.

 The highway we were traveling on followed right beside the Canal du Midi for miles and miles.  At one of the rest areas (aires) we stopped and walked up to get a close up look at the canal and one of the locks.  The canal is bordered on both sides by plane trees, and the rest stop was surrounded with cottonwood trees.  The rest area was covered with the “cotton” from the trees so deep that it looked like snow.

We got off the main highway to visit one of the Cathar towns called Castelnaudary which also proclaims itself as the cassoulet capital of the world.

Our goal today was to get down to Caunes-Minervois where we have a house rented for the next week.  We skirted around Carcassonne and made it to town earlier than we had thought.  We called our landlady and she said we could come on.  She met us in the Abbey parking lot, and we drove up narrow little streets to our house.  We tucked the mirrors in on the side of the car, and she (Ingrid) was amazed that Leon managed to get up to the house without hitting any walls at all.  We unpacked our suitcases, and Leon drove back down to the parking lot.  We walked back up to the house and settled for a while and then drove to the next little village to buy some groceries.

Ingrid had recommended that we have our evening meal catered and recommended a lady who could do it for us.  I emailed and arranged the meal a couple of months ago.  It was nice to have a Camembert/tomato tart and boeuf bourguignon with all the trimmings delivered right to our door.  We even got sticky toffee pudding for dessert.  Ingrid had left a welcome bottle of wine for us, so we went to our little patio and had our wonderful dinner.

After dinner, we walked around the neighborhood just to get acquainted and saw this cat sitting on a window ledge watching birds flying over.  This is a tiny village sort of in the middle of nowhere.  Ingrid is from South Africa and has lived here with her writer husband for 12 years.  She owns 3 of these old houses and rents them out. Our little house has a living room with a fireplace, kitchen, and eating area on the first floor.  There is a little patio off the kitchen.  Up spiral stairs is a bedroom and bathroom, and then up one more flight of stairs is the master bedroom and another bath.  This house is several hundred years old and was once a cobbler’s shop.  There is a huge rose bush growing out of the street ,and it is all across the front of the house.

 Sunday will be a day of rest for us...as well as laundry day.