Day 8 - Carcassonne

Isla woke up at 6:30 again but this time I'd slept through the night so felt exponentially better AND she went

back to sleep after eating. I looked out the window and it was pouring down rain. The farm looked really cool all covered in mist. We enjoyed our buffet breakfast of the same foods offered the previous day, packed up and were on our way. Because we were deep in the countryside, the road system consisted basically of a lot of one-lane, windy roads. We didn't have a good map of the area so sort of guessed our way back to a main road. We gambled incorrectly and went left instead of right at one point which made for an extra LOOOOONG drive to get to Les-Eyzies (the closest town to the farm). Our goal was to hit up a market in a town called Le Bugue before we made our way even further south into France. But there was a detour and what should have been a quick 20 minute trip took us more than an hour. The rain let up (briefly) and we managed to find a parking spot and crossed the river to see the market.

We probably were only there 5 minutes when the rain resumed. As it turned out, Isla had outgrown the only closed-toed shoes her mama had packed for her and so she was stuck, socks-only in the rain. We tried to hold the umbrella just right to keep her feet/legs dry but we still had a few people pointing with horror.

Doesn't it look like a rainy day at Pike Place? Of course, the backdrop of old buildings here are the only slight difference. :)

We bought some fresh tiny strawberries, a peach, pear and some bananas for Isla. We couldn't resist the bag of 6 beignets either. I'd fallen in love with my first beignet in New Orleans as a child but these didn't come close to measuring up. I don't think they were fresh which was disappointing. When we returned to the car, we were completely soaked. I removed Isla's socks and stuffed them part way into the heater vent and blasted the heat. She had dry socks in no time. :)

We got semi-lost trying to make our way to a main road again and eventually made it to Sarlat, which was the biggest town around (and one that was on our map!) From there it took forever to get back to the autoroute and I was beginning to feel carsick after spending an hour and a half turning and winding on the tiny country roads.

We stopped at a truck stop and ate our strawberries along with an Asian soybean noodle salad and a chicken baguette sandwich we'd purchased for lunch. At around 4 PM, we arrived in Carcassonne, our final destination. We drove into a bustling, large, charmless city and were initially quite disappointed. Where was the medieval city on the hill that we'd been told popped up at you from out of nowhere? Ahhh, but then we spotted it, the giant fortified old city, looming ahead. Wow! (We soon learned that the city has now been divided into the "new city" and "old city" and we'd entered through the "new city," hence our initial disappointment).

We checked into our crazy modern hotel that must have an account with Ikea. I loved our room and bathroom! They were so neat and tidy yet modern. Check out the rest of the hotel--it was all quite fun!

We were so excited to have Internet for the first time since leaving Seattle over a week prior and got distracted checking our e-mail and reading all our friends' status updates. ;) (What has this world come to that we would "waste" precious time in such fashion!?) We learned that in two days, a chimney sweep would be coming through our place back in Kirkland and we would need to be there to let him in or suffer the cost of bringing him back on our own time, when most convenient. Awesome. Glad we got so much of a heads up! My in-laws graciously agreed to shuttle a key to one of our neighbors who was able to open up our place on cleaning day. Phew!

After literally tearing ourselves away from Graham's I-pod Touch (our Internet access source), we headed up the hill to the walled city, known as La Cite. The weather could not make up her mind but at least the rain held off and it was actually quite warm despite dark clouds! The fortified city was really neat. There were actually two walls protecting the inner city and this picture is taken between the outer wall (on the left) and the inner wall (on the right). The walls came equipped with slits for shooting arrows through and little notches above where city residents could dump buckets of hot liquid on invaders below. It was pretty amazing to see a city this old and realize arrow-shooting battles in draw-bridged stone cities really did happen.

We were able to walk along the top of the outer wall which eventually rose to be pretty high off the ground (and there were no guard rails! gasp!) Here is the view outside one of the walls, a lovely vineyard. Maybe it's just me, but this seems far too peaceful to be a place where "bad guys" would hide out.

Inside La Cite, we followed Rick Steve's walking tour which led us through the St. Nazaire Church which had a beautiful mix of Roman and Gothic architecture. The church no longer functions as a church as its priest left for another church down the hill given the dwindling population of people inside the city wall.

La Cite with a view of the the rest of Carcassonne in the distance.

Here is what the streets looked like inside the city. They were narrow with stone cobbled streets (everything was made of stone!) which pretty much nearly killed our stroller. I loved the lanterns on the sides of buildings and the shutters on the windows.

My goal while in Carcassonne was to eat cassoulet, classic "peasant cuisine" in this region. It is a rich, slow-cooked dish with white beans and meat of different types (usually pork, sausage, duck and sometimes mutton). All of the restaurants in La Cite were a bit touristy but all offered cassoulet which didn't help us narrow down the options. We finally settled on a place that had a high chair (woohoo!) and lots of fun medieval decor. Graham started with French onion soup and I had a goat cheese salad. Next came Graham's main dish of sausage links with fries and my cassoulet. Graham received surprisingly few pieces of meat so we ended up cutting it into pieces and tossing it in the cassoulet and sharing. It was definitely not the most amazing thing I've ever eaten but was quite homey, a real comfort food. Isla really enjoyed her first white beans and loved the sausage too. We had a red Minervois wine to drink and I had coffee ice cream for dessert and Graham, bread pudding.

After dinner, we took a quick walk down to the "New City" to try to catch a better glimpse of the old city in its entirety. We were hoping to see it all lit up, as we'd heard it looked really cool at night. But unfortunately, it doesn't seem that night ever falls in France as it was nearing 10 PM when we took this picture below and look how light it is! Isla was obviously already done for (she refused to sleep against Graham's chest and WANTED to lay like this) so we headed back to our hotel for the night.

We were able to Skype home (FOR FREE!) on Graham's I-Pod touch and so talked with my mom for a bit then hit the sack. Our bed was awesome and so would have been our night of sleep if it hadn't been for the hallway party halfway through the night...