Carcassone

Yesterday Amanda and I were lucky enough to have Einat, an experienced (or at least more so than us) southern France traveler, show us the way to Carcassone. Carcassone is a neighboring city and is home to VERY large castle that looks like it hopped off the page of a fairy-tale.

We took the train from Limoux at 2:30. The station is located across the river to the other side of town behind the Psychiatric Hospital (very strange thing to walk past in the sunny European village).

We were pretty exhausted from our late arrival into Limoux from Cholet the night before. We debated finding a shuttle and then thought about taking a cab but we decided to enjoy the sunshine and walk. So our walk to the castle was goofy and slow but we were excited to see some commotion and commerce for a change. (Limoux is not exactly a hoppin town :)






While the castle was exciting and interesting, I have to admit that we went for the cookies. Yes, the cookies. Einat was raving about them for about half an hour on our loooonnnggg car ride home from the race. If we were going to walk across Carcassone we were going to need some fuel, after all.














We arrived at the castle and found: moat, draw bridge, employees in costumes and, of course, THE cookies. The cookies were our first stop. Once we had our treats we explored the narrow streets (?) and window shopped. We went inside the church and took a gander at the HUGE organ and the stained glass windows.
































We made a friend inside the castle: his name is Bob. He is advertising for the haunted mansion tour. His keeper, the friendly man who caused the lovely picture on the right above, had a good time giving me a "preview" of the ghosts in the haunted tour by scaring the crap out of me while trying to take a picture like the one on the left above.




This was a short trip because we had to be back to Limoux to accompany Chris and his first round of hotel guests to a farm-house in the hills for a completely organice and home-cooked meal. At 7:05 sharp we all piled into the car and followed a bus full of 9 senior women ranging in age from early 60s to almost 80. These women stay in Chris' hotel and he drives them around to different locations so that they can ride their bikes through the local villages (at 80 years old!) They were a funny bunch and were completely enthused with the idea that we were all here training with hopes of someday being in the Olympics (so Chris told them). The dinner was delicious!

We started with a big salad, chicken patee (a rare kind of patee I was told), and home-baked baguette. Then we had endives that were baked under a layer of cheese followed by rabbit in a wine broth. For dessert we had tarte au pomme (apple tart which here is a very thin pastry crust with sliced up apples and a layer of galze over the top) and home-made pain du pis (gingerbread) ice cream, which I unfortunately could not eat (damn lactose intolerance!) The whole meal we had bottles of Blanquette (this is what Limoux is famous for - it is a white sparkling wine and supposedly it was the predecessor for Champagne) and pitchers of red wine. Yummmm!