CARCASSONE

After leaving Biarritz we travelled eastwards away from the Atlantic Coast and eventually came across a town called Carcassone. This was one of the highlights of France, the town had a medieval walled village that was first constructed back in the 12th Century, over 800 years ago. The village has been kept in excellent condition and all the old buildings within the wall are shops, restaurants, cafes and some accommodations. The authorities have made sure that all the traders within the walls authenticate their business to ensure it retains the heritage of this amazing place. I guess some could say that commercialism and capitalism shouldn't be allowed in such old and historical sites, but on the other hand it is probably needed to fund the continual maintenance required to preserve such an old site, and it actaully creates an really good atmosphere.

We tried to avoid the expressways as much as possible because they are expensive to travel on, all the expressways in France appear to be privately owned and you have to pay a toll, on average about 8-10 Euros.

On leaving Carcassone we headed further east towards the coast as we wanted to spend the night in another coastal village. We drove to a village on the Mediterranean coast called Gruissan, we drove around for ages in this rather small place trying to find accommodation but couldn't find anything. We pulled into one motel on the water to see of they had any rooms available, the parking lot was quite full but we thought we would give it a go anyway, there seemed to be a flurry of activity in the car park of minibuses and people walking about. Matt got out of the car to go the the reception. I recall taking this opportunity to further study the layout of the controls and instrumentation of the left-hand drive car that we had hired. I next looked up to observe a station wagon reversing at high speed towards me and before I had the opportunity to do anything, even honk the horn at the rapidly approaching vehicle, it had no sooner reversed straight into the left rear side of our hire car. I got out of the car and the driver of the other car which was a Peugeot station wagon also exited his car, he was very apologetic. The guy's name was Jacques, and he smelled as if he had one or two Vin rouges (red wines), he was very helpful and we sat down and sorted out all of the insurance paperwork. Remarkably his Peugeot diesel station wagon had sustained no damage at all, and he didn't seem at all worried about the occurrence and handled it all as if it has happened to him before. As soon as we finished the insurance paperwork, we bidded each other farewell and he rapidly zoomed off in a cloud of diesel smoke, probably to meet up with some pretty french girl, leaving Matt and I pondering over the imminent 600 Euro insurance excess with the hire car company.

The photos are of Carcassone, and Matt acting like a foreign tourist!