Day 2: Carcassonne

The plan for today was to visit Carcassonne, a town around 60 miles southeast of Toulouse. The weather was not forecast to be as good as it had been yesterday, and during the night Tim and I could definitely hear rain beating down on the skylight window of our bedroom. When we stepped outside around 09.30 this morning Toulouse did look a bit damp, but the day seemed like it had the potential to brighten up.

The journey to Carcassonne took a bit over an hour on a regional train. Soon we were stepping out of the station into the newer part of the town where we found a Carcassonne sign...

...and Matt even took a photo of us together  

From the station it's a walk of 15 or 20 minutes to get to the famous old town. We walked through some pretty gardens, complete with very large French flag...

...then found ourselves at a bridge over the river Aude, from where we had our first view of the medieval walled city.

And what a view it was!

We had actually intended to be walking across the older bridge you can see in the distance in this photo, so we needed to make our way in that direction.

Soon we had made it to the right part of town and could start the uphill walk towards the castle walls.

There was a fair bit of uphill, but it was definitely worth it.

Although it wasn't the sunniest of days, the walls still looked incredible.

The rain was just about holding off, though it did feel quite windy, as we started to explore.

The nice thing about being here on a not very sunny day in March was that the town wasn't full of tourists.

Carcassonne is beautiful but the town inside the walls is quite small, with narrow streets that get absolutely jam-packed with tourists at the busier times of the year.

In 2016 Tim and I stayed in a little apartment inside the city walls for a couple of nights and were able to walk around the walls in the early morning, before the hordes of tourists arrived.

This morning it felt like we were getting the same experience of walking around deserted walls, although it was closer to midday.

Unfortunately, the weather didn't 100% cooperate and the clouds were starting to look a bit threatening.

At some point it started to rain more heavily and we figured it would be a good opportunity to head into the centre of town and find somewhere to eat. Indoors, today!

We did find a really nice restaurant with an affordable menu of the day. I had pate, lasagne and a sugary crepe to finish

By the time we'd finished eating, the weather in Carcassonne had markedly improved!

It was still quite chilly if you stood in the wind, but there was now a beautiful blue sky.

We retraced some of our steps from earlier, enjoying the views of the walls with better weather.

There were some nice views out over the surrounding countryside too.

I thought I might even be able to see a bit of snow on top of one of the mountains in the distance.

Eventually it was time to start the climb back down towards the newer part of town.

It was much easier going down than up!

Tim and I had one more thing which we were hoping to do while we were in Carcassonne.

When I'd been trying to pin the location of the train station on my offline map before the trip, the name of one particular street caught my attention.

We've been to Carcassonne so many times and never realised that it had its own Zamenhof Street!

We had to walk about a kilometre out of our way to find it, but we tracked it down without any problems...

...and managed to get a few good photos

Then we had a kilometre walk back to the town centre to meet up with the others and catch our train back towards Toulouse.  It was a fun end to what has been another fun day in France