Carcassonne: A quick holiday overview 5 comments
I know there’s nothing worse than boring people senseless with holiday photos and videos and “First we went here, then we went there, then we did that…” kind of stories, so I’ll not bother with all that. I’ll just give you an overview of some of the highlights. (Though if you do want all 600+ photos, go see my Flickr account here: www.flickr.com/photos/aragornsbeard)
Firstly, the landscape is stunning. Les Montagnes Noir to the north, the Pyrenees to the south and fields and fields of vines and, towards the end of the holiday, sunflowers. Just beautiful. And with all the hills around, there is no end of good viewpoints to enjoy it from. We drove up into the pyrenees and somehow managed to find ourselves driving up the biggest mountain in the region (2001m!). It was rather scary, but we felt rather proud that we had managed it.
Carcassonne itself is a city in 2 halves - la bastide and La Cité. La Cité is the ancient medieval walled city that has been restored into a magnificent structure that dominates the skyline. It’s a very magical place, steeped in history and legend. This region is Cathar country and La Cité was one of the few safe places for followers of this religion, until the crusaders arrived and wiped them out. La bastide is a slightly more recent addition, consisting of classic chessboard arrangement of streets around a central square. We spent several days exploring la cité, but never really visited the bastide very much this time around. I found la cité to be a fascinating place, and I love the history and folklore around it. After a while I did start to find it a little too commercialised though, with every street stuffed full of shops and restaurants. But i guess this is necessary if the tourists are going to keep the place alive.
Bastille Day was amazing. We joined thousands of other people gathered around la cité to watch the most spectacular firework display we have ever seen. Huge fireworks lit up the entire sky with a million tiny stars, bursting into different colours and patterns. At one point the whole of la cité seemed to be on fire! Quite incredible.
We went to Foix to watch the end of stage 11 of the Tour de France, which was another really great experience. We had imagined getting quite bored waiting hours for the riders to flash by in 10 seconds flat, but in fact the build-up was the best part of the day. There 
were people giving our freebies all day - water, hats, bags, sweets, foam hands, keyrings… all manner of stuff was given out. There was dancing, singing, competitions… such a great atmosphere, that the race itself really became just a side-show. As it was,the riders did race past in 3 seconds flat and we barely saw them, but it was a great day nonetheless.
We enjoyed having a pool all to ourselves. The kids had a whale of a time and we had several night of late-night silliness round it.
The house has a cat, Tickle. Before the holiday we were not really bothered about cats, but, having spent 2 weeks with this ginger tabby, we are all smitten. She really won us over and very quickly became part of the routine. So much so that the only way we could get the children to leave the house was by promising them that we would get a cat of our own when we returned. What a transformation! So if you live near me and you have a spare cat you would like to be re-homed, drop me a line.
Overall we had a wonderful time and look forward to hopefully returning again next year as there is still so much to explore. If anyone is looking for a new region to visit, I would certainly reccomend Carcassonne.