We had a free day yesterday (I know, don’t laugh, your perspective changes on a long vacation, I suppose the word I should have used was “unscheduled”), so we decided to take a quick drive up to the Pyrenees, which on the map look to be less than an hour from our house. It didn’t turn out that way, due to the fact that everyone with a car in France […]
We awoke on Friday and had a great (if somewhat overpriced) breakfast in the hotel, then went to see more of Narbonne. It turns out it is a very old city, having been established by the Romans during the second century B.C. It has an interesting history (which you can read here), which unfortunately has the heyday of the city occurring before the 14th century (it turns out that the […]
We returned last night from what my son Andrew called a vacation (to the Mediterranean) from our vacation (to Toulouse) from our vacation (in Paris). We left Wednesday morning and drove from Aigrefeulle to the beach between Gruissan and Narbonne-Plage. For orientation, here’s a map showing the spots we visited (zoom in to get the details): The beach was very broad, and very relaxing and sunny, and not at all […]
We got a late start today because of the rain, which fortunately cleared off by late morning. Since we’d driven the prior two days, we decided to keep close to home and visit Toulouse, which we had not yet seen. It was an easy 15 minute drive to the Metro station (free parking, too) and a quick 15 minute tram ride into the older part of the city. I had […]
A short post today … on Sunday we drove east to the city of Castres. It was pretty, located along a river, but absolutely dead on Sunday. There was a museum dedicated to Spanish art in general, and the painter Goya in particular, which was interesting (but hot). I think that Goya was a very disturbed man. After the museum, we had a short picnic and then traveled further east […]
I mentioned previously that our housemate, a cat named Reglisse, kept us up the night before last by persistently mewing first outside of our bedroom window, then outside our bedroom door. To ensure that didn’t happen last night, we decided to lock him in the little room where his food and cat door are located, by blocking the cat door with several heavy objects. Since the room also contains the […]
Our final destination was the small village of Soreze. It is on a site dating from the 9th century, and contains many old buildings. Unlike many villages, the streets in the older part have not been widened to accommodate automobiles, and thus walking through the village you can imagine that it looked more or less the same 200 or 300 years ago. Soreze was the site of an abbey which […]
On rare occasions, you have a day that is just perfect, from beginning to end. We had one of those today, which we really needed after the prior evening, which was an unpleasant manifestation of too-much-family-togetherness over the past month, and after our poor night’s sleep, thanks to the cat, which alternated sitting outside our window and mewing and sitting outside our bedroom door and mewing. We would consider locking […]
We are staying in a little village close to Toulouse called which means “bitter” or “sour” (aigre) “leaf” (feuille), although we haven’t tasted any to confirm. As noted yesterday, our house is large and comfortable, sited on a hill overlooking a small valley. The view from the hill down: And the view from the valley up: For you Google Map fans (count me in), here’s a map showing the location […]
We’re very much enjoying being out of Paris and into the country again. We are staying in a wonderful home in a small village outside of Toulouse. The countryside reminds us very much of home — lavender and oleander, photinia, plum and apple trees, tomatoes. The exception to the familiar feel are the nearly endless fields of sunflowers growing all around this area, plus the more general green-ness of the […]