Leaving our little house, heading north, rediscovering Sarlat

Day 14 France 2012

We left our wonderful little house in Caunes-Minervois and headed north toward Sarlat.  We drove on the toll road through Toulouse and Montauban (12.00 Euros) and then got off to go through more scenic country.  The toll roads are excellent and fast, but often have tall trees or berms beside the road so that you can’t see a lot of the scenery.  We crossed the Tarn and Lot Rivers, saw the landscape change from vineyards to fruit orchards, and went through wonderful little villages.

As we drove through the village of Gourdon, situated on top of a hill, I felt like déjà vu all over again.  I kept telling Leon that I had been through that town but he did not remember it at all.  I remembered a church with a clock tower on the left side of the street and a sign with a picture of a goose on the right (this is foie gras country).  Well, as we drove on through the town, there was the church and the sign with the goose was still there!  We had been here with Jason and Caroline back in 1999.  I have photos of the church and the goose sign in an album from that trip.  Gourdon seems to be the only town we have revisited on this trip that was just as I had remembered it. 

Some observations:  Most cars in France are hatchbacks not sedans.  Side mirrors all fold in so you can go down narrow village streets.  Butter is used on sandwiches instead of mayonnaise or mustard. The rapeseed that we see growing everywhere is used to make canola oil. Roadside markets advertise “Fruits & Legumes (vegetables).”  Corn is mostly grown for cattle feed.  Our street in Caunes-Minervois was called Rue Les Lavandieres…I thought it had to do with lavender…nope, it means the street of washerwomen!

Sarlat:

When we got here, it was market day.  Our host, Herve, had emailed us to warn us that we would not be able to park anywhere near the B&B.  We drove around town and managed to find a parking spot a few blocks away, so we made a few trips to the car to haul all our stuff to the B&B which is on the Rue de la Republique, the main street in the old part of town.

We are staying in a place called Le Petit Manoir.  There are only two rooms as a B&B although there is a nice restaurant downstairs that has been here for several years.  We talked with the owner who said that the upstairs where we are is where his daughter used to live, but she has moved to Paris to work and so he turned her apartment into two bedrooms that he rents out.  There is a big sitting room with leather chairs around a fireplace just outside the bedrooms.  Everything in the bathroom is very classy and new.  The bedroom has wood floors, a canopy bed, antique furniture, and a beautiful marble fireplace.  

We asked him the history of the house since it is really beautiful.  He said that part of it dates from the fifteenth century and part of it was added in the seventeenth century.  The older part has black and white marble flooring and the newer part has beautiful parquet wooden floors.  The man who owned this house was a lawyer and was called to be a lawyer for Marie Antoinette during the Revolution.  He said that although he was a good lawyer, there was nobody who could have saved the queen during that time.  He also said that Sarlat was home to a revolutionary tribunal for ten years.

The stairway is in a round tower at the front of the building.

This is a wonderful town of narrow streets and old houses.  Just looking out over the rooftops is interesting.  The building next door to us is probably 400 years old and has a satellite dish attached to the top floor.  When we first started coming to France years ago, I took photos of the rooftops with TV antennas sticking up from every roof.  We do not see that as much now although there are a few mixed in with the satellite dishes. 

We walked along the main street to see the market.  We had been to the market a few years ago with Diana, and remembered wonderful fruits and vegetables in a central square and then inside a building with the largest door I have ever seen, there was an indoor market that sold foie gras and walnut products.  Sarlat is the center of foie gras and walnut (what we call English walnuts) production.  In fact, this is called the “Route du foie gras.”

 Anyway, the square is now all sidewalk cafes and the building with the huge door was all locked up.  The market is now mostly trinkets and t-shirts and is all along the main street.  We saw only a couple of vegetable stands.  I was so disappointed.  Leon said we were going to have to stop coming back to towns we had been to before because they are changing so much that we are disappointed when we get there.  Honfleur and Mont St. Michel were like that this trip.  

 

Dinner in the restaurant downstairs seemed like a good idea since it was so close, and we really liked our host who also ran the restaurant.  We noticed that over half of the patrons in the restaurant also spoke English and wondered if the restaurant is listed in tour books.  Sure enough, when we got back upstairs, we looked in our Rick Steves’ book, and it is listed as a good place to eat. I had a gizzard salad with a poached egg and foie gras pate on toast.  I had a gizzard salad in Carcassonne years ago that had actual duck gizzards on top of the salad, but this one had minced pieces of gizzard wrapped in a thin pastry shell and fried.  It was delicious anyway.

Leon had an entree (what the French call an appetizer) that was foie gras pate with a creme brulee of foie gras.

I ordered salmon and Leon had boeuf for our main courses, and they were both delicious.

Because this is walnut country lots of the desert choices have walnuts in them.  We both chose the walnut tart with chocolate sauce.

We were really tired, so decided to go to bed early.  We told Herve that we wanted breakfast about 9:30, so that meant we could sleep 10 hours and catch up on our lost sleep. 

R&R, packing, and a house tour

Day 13 France 2012

We were up before 6:00 this morning in order to get Caroline and Dave down to Narbonne to catch an early train back to Barcelona.  Leon and I were really sad to have them leave.  We have enjoyed having adventures with them the past couple of days and were thrilled to be the first to celebrate their engagement with them.

Leon and I had grand plans to drive beyond Narbonne and see some areas we had not seen before, but have been going strong lately and decided we would just come back to the house, rest up, do laundry, and pack for our departure from our wonderful little house tomorrow.  We will really miss our precious little French village house.

I realized that I have only posted photos of the outside of the house and the courtyard.  I should have taken lots of photos before everything became so “lived in,” but I copied some photos from the website and so you can get an idea of what it looks like. 

The master bedroom and bathroom are on the 3^rd floor up a tiny spiral staircase.

The second bedroom and bath are on the second floor.

The first floor has a living area with a fireplace, a kitchen, a dining area, and our wonderful little enclosed courtyard.

Tomorrow we will head north to Sarlat.  We have been there a couple of times before, but love it and look forward to staying there again.  We are staying in a different place this time, a new B&B in the heart of town.  Another adventure!

The great walled city of Carcassonne, following the Tour de France through the Pyrenees, and a quest for a chicken

Day 12 France 2012

On the way to Carcassonne, we stopped by Notre Dame du Cros, a small church in the mountains outside Caunes.  There are trails built around the church that have the stations of the cross along them.  We noticed vans from a nearby university and school in the parking lot and walked behind the church and saw that there were students climbing the rock face of the mountain.

Caroline and Dave walked up on one of the trails where the stations of the cross were.

The inside of the church was decorated in the same red and white marble from the local quarries.

We arrived at Carcassonne amid a crowd of tourists.  The wonderful walled city continues to entrance all who see it even though it has not been authentically restored. 

Legend tells us that Madam Carcass saved the city from a siege of Charlemagne's army., and therefore, the city is named after her.

There is a castle inside the walls.

 Leon and I walked around the city and found the B&B where we stayed back in 1999 on our first visit to Carcassonne with Jason and Caroline.

One of our favorite memories of Carcassonne is the church.  The last time we were here, there was a wonderful French choir performing American gospel spirituals.  We mentioned this to our landlord, and he said that the French have a real fascination with American music of this type.  As it turned out, there was a wonderful acapella men's quartet performing this time when we walked in the church.  The acoustics inside the church are perfect, so the sound of a musical group just resounds throughout the building.  There are beautiful stained glass windows in the church.

After we left Carcassonne, we headed toward the Pyrenees to drive one leg of the Tour de France coming up in July.  We drove through several small villages and took photos of scenery along the way.

The Pyrenees are steep and rocky.  We tried to imagine the bikers racing down these roads and going through these picturesque villages.  We decided to drive through the St. Georges Gorge, a narrow gorge that is cut by a river through the mountains.  It was kind of scary to drive along with rocky outcrops and overhangs and a tunnel cut through the rock.

Just an aside that we noticed while we have been here this week.  Buses like this are used to transport children to and from school.  We did not know if they are public buses that are also used to transport students or if the French have really fancy school buses!

After being in the car for much of the afternoon, we decided that we would stop by a market and pick up a roasted chicken and other foods and eat in our own little courtyard for dinner.  We stopped by a large supermarket and bought some groceries and then found out that they were already out of roasted chickens.  We thought we would just go to another market and pick up the chicken.  The next 3 markets were also out of roasted chickens.  Now we were really on a quest for that chicken.  We were determined to find a chicken to go with all the other food we had bought.  Finally market #5 had a chicken, so we came home to  put together our wonderful dinner.  Here are Caroline and Dave on the way back to our little house with the prized chicken!

We ate our delicious dinner, checked a little email, and decided we needed to go to bed a little earlier since we have to get up early Friday morning to take Caroline and Dave back to Narbonne to catch their train back to Barcelona.

A canal boat ride, the Abbey, and an engagement dinner

 Day 11 France 2012

We  decided to drive over to the Canal du Midi and take a short boat ride up the canal.  The tour boat travels slowly, 8 km per hour.  Boats are not allowed to travel fast so that the wake from the boats will not damage the banks of the canal.  The canal was built during the years 1666 - 1681, and was hand dug.  It goes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic about 150 miles in all.  It was originally built for commercial transportation, but is only used for recreational purposes now. We went under three bridges, and this is the first one...built in 1730.

Because of the difference in elevation over the length of the canal, there are a series of locks on the canal.  We managed to go through two of them.  The locks are large enough for 4 boats to go through at a time.  The locks raise and lower the boats from 12 to 18 feet at a time.

The canal is lined on both sides by plane trees that were planted about 100 years ago so that their roots would stabilize the sides of canal. 

Caroline and Dave were with us on the boat ride.  The bridge behind them is wider than many of the other bridges.  It was built wide enough for the horses towing the barges to go under the bridge. 

The earliest bridges built were too narrow for the horses. Boats coming through the older bridges have to be careful to go through exactly in the center.

The tow paths are not always still available right beside the canal, but bike and walking paths have been built  beside the canal.  We saw lots of bikers and hikers along the way.  We thought this biker was interesting with her dog in the basket.

There are 45,000 plane trees lining the canal, but recently some of the trees have died.  It appears that the water of the canal harbors a disease that is sickening and killing the trees along the canal.  You can see some of the dead trees in this photo.  There are 8000 sick or dead trees that are going to be removed from the canal since there is no cure for the disease.  New resistant trees will replace them.

The sick trees are marked with orange dots and the dead ones are marked with green lines.

After we returned from the boat ride, we came back to Caunes-Minervois to visit the Abbey just down the street from our little house.  The Abbey, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, was founded around 780.  This area was part of the Cathar territory, and one of the popes came here to preach Catholic orthodoxy.  The Abbey was actually able to purchase land from people who had been Cathar sympathizers. One of the Cathar bishops was burnt at the stake right here in Caunes. 

In 1590, during the religious wars, Caunes was held under siege and the walls and gates of the village along with the Abbey were razed to the ground.   The main part of the Abbey was rebuilt in 1600, then restored again in 1696.  It was designated state property after the Revolution in 1791. The interior is beautifully decorated with the red and white marble from the local quarries.  The white marble is Carrara marble from Italy.

The gardens beside the Abbey have beautiful roses like we have found all over this area of France.  Inside the Abbey we found this statue of a woman with roses.

In the evening, we had reservations for a celebration dinner at the Hotel d'Alibert, named after the abbot who rebuilt the Abbey in 1600.  The Hotel d'Alibert was constructed in the Italian style during the 16th century.  It has a lovely interior courtyard with a canopied well dated 1561.  We ate in this courtyard.

Caroline showing off her beautiful new engagement ring.

We had a wonderful dinner.  We ordered different entrees, main courses, and desserts.  Here are some of our choices:
Leon and Caroline ordered duck breast and goat cheese salad.

Leon ordered the cassoulet.

I had the chocolate dessert.

Dave had the strawberry soup with mint sorbet.

Dave and I are enjoying our wine and the ambiance of the Hotel d'Alibert.

Leon and I were so happy to have Caroline and Dave with us for a few days to enjoy this beautiful part of France with us.