narshada

Holimoonaversary!

For those of you struggling with the concept, it was mine and Pinklet's first holiday together, which coincided with our first wedding anniversary and technically it was also our honeymoon as we couldn't afford to go last year after the wedding.

My best (wo)man and her hubby visited us a while back and suggested the south of France, as they were going around the same sort of time. I managed to sell some shares from work and made a tidy little packet, so the deal was done.

We flew into Beziers airport on Saturday, 2nd Oct. I chuckled a little due to the fact that mathematical representations of curves rendered on computers (think Photoshop or any 3D software,) use bezier curves, which use bezier algorithms to define the curve. Yes, I'm THAT much of a geek. We landed at about 8-9pm. (I forget exactly.)

We picked up the hire car, which was a silver little Chevrolet Spark. My advice - NEVER buy one and only hire one if you're just pootling about & don't need to accelerate very often & definitely not uphill.
We headed out to our destination which was going to be an hour or two's drive.

All went well on the motorway. We really only hit trouble when if got dark, we left the motorway for some pretty small country roads, and we discovered that the map on the website showing where the cottage was, was utterly wrong. By about 10km.
Let me tell you, driving in the dark, in an unfamiliar car, on the wrong side of the road, IN THICK FOG, to a place that isn't there, when I'm tired - is not my idea of fun.

We called the owner of the cottage, a Scottish guy. He was very amenable, but his idea of directions and ours diverged quite sharply.

Pinklet: We're on road (x) near village (y).
Him: Dunno them.
Pinklet: Well, we're also near St. Julien ...
Him: Oh yeah! We're only about 3km from there!
Pinklet: Great! Which way do we go?
Him: Drive through St. Julien ...
Pinklet: In which direction?
Him: Well, just drive through the village ...
Pinklet: Yes, but which direction? North, South, East, West? We could head totally the wrong way.
Him: Ahhh, yeah. Well, drive through the village ...
Me: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARgh!

Eventually, he drove out to St. Julien to meet us, bless him. He was so lovely I manged to control my fist of doom.
We got to the cottage and suddenly it was all totally worth it:

They'd bought a large bottle of wine and made us a pasta bolognaise. We didn't have the heart to tell them we were veggie.

Next day, the cottage looked even better:

Double bedroom with half walled off en-suite shower & toilet, a separate shower & toilet room, another bedroom with two single beds and upstairs was the open plan lounge, kitchen & dining room, complete with tv, DVD's, board games, magazines, all in a beautiful rustic converted barn & it was huge. For a second I thought there's been a mistake as this was obviously the sort of place grown-ups rent for holidays, not the likes of me.

There was also a private pool:

Which came complete with lizards:

We ventured into the lovely little town of Mirepoix the next day, which boasted a medieval square and was stunning:

The weather was a little up & down - we had a couple of days where it was too hot to sit out in it, a little bit of rain and a couple of blustery days, but regardless, we were happy:




The big attraction was the nearby city of Carcassonne, which boasts a medieval walled city & castle & the castle is the one the Disney 'fairytale castle' is based on. I highly recommend seeing it if you can, it was awesome. Even better than that, that was the day we met up with our friends and explored together and it was also one of the hot days:
(Lots of pics under the spoiler.)

We found the cathedral and were treated to an impromptu male voice choir:

Outside again & Sam & Jeff got acquainted with a local Knight:



Later, we went back to their cottage, swam in their pool and went out for a meal in the evening. They'd foind a vegetarian restaurant in a place called Limoux:


But when we got there it was closed so we got pizza in a nearby place instead:


Pinklet and I went back on Friday evening when it was open and it was very good.

There were a couple of days where we did pretty much nothing:


And that was good too,

On the way back we drove through the mountains - very large drop on one side, very foggy, slightly scary but alll in all a brilliant adventure and somewhere we'd definitely go back to again. (There were loads of other Cathar castles that Sam & Jeff visited that we didn't.)

Randoms:

Best Holimoonaversary ever.