A windy, winding way.

Friday 25th May

Today was a taste of Australia day.

Rob has been doing French classes at U3A the past 12 months or so and a couple who also do the classes have a house here in France, not far from where we are. We went to visit them for lunch and had a lovely day. Their house is in a lovely location, right in the heart of a tiny village, but a close drive to all services in a few directions. Such a peaceful feeling place. You can see they have done a lot of work in the house and garden and have many plans in front of them.

After lunch it was home to pack ready to move on tomorrow. We will be sad to leave here - it has been a very relaxing week in a beautiful area.

Not quite the Aussie style bbq.
Seemed to take forever to cook but was very nice.

Saturday 26th May

On the move again, heading 200k south towards Carcassonne. Today I left the route up to Dora rather than tell her via this or that place. She certainly provided us with an interesting drive with a mix of main, secondary, tertiary and other roads. We wound in and out of forests, through farmland mostly wheat crops, through vineyards, and tiny little villages. Every now and then we would spy a chateau perched on a hill but we bypassed most of them as we had a bit of distance to cover.

We finally did stop at a village we saw on a hill. A bit of a detour that had Dora replotting like mad, but what a beautiful medieval village we found. We wandered in and out and around the lanes of the village. The wind was blowing a gale up there and Rob had to chase down his hat - as we've always said, if you get views, you get the wind.

The second entry gate to the village of Puycelsi.

Wandering the laneways. Love all the stone work.
This village was from the 14th century.

The tiny chapel.

The painting on the ceiling in this church was fabulous
- Rob lay on the floor for a photo!

One for the cat lovers.

We passed on lunch here as it was expensive and not a lot of choice, and half an hour later we found the town of Lisle sur Tarn. This was a lovely town also with some very interesting timber and angles on the buildings. We ordered hamburgers with the meat between medium rare and well done - didn't  have the right french words, but managed to convey what we wanted. Blow me, while we were waiting I heard the waitress speak to a fellow in English about his dog (schnauzer), and we found out that she was actually English. The waiter there was interested that we were Australian as he plans to go to Australia in September.

Buildings around the town square in Lisle sur Tarn.

It was blowing a gale most of the rest of our trip, strong enough to push the car around on the road. We saw on the news tonight that there were heavy hail storms in the southwest that caused a lot of damage to crops and vineyards.

As we got closer to our overnight stop here in Castelnaudary we could see the Pyrenees in the distance - still snow covered in places. We won't be going any closer this trip, but in 2 weeks we will be in the french alps. It will be interesting to see how much snow there is there.

Have a look at this on a big screen - maybe you can see the snow.