Last weekend we visited Carcassonne, a town that I am yet to be able to say the name of properly. Despite Meg and Maeve’s attempts to help me by telling me to think of A Carcass on a sofa, I still always say it wrong. I have given up haha.
We set off early from Perigueux so that we could enjoy a full day in Carcassonne. Once we arrived, we fell immediately in love with with the place, I don’t know what it was about it, but even the “new” town gave us a great feeling! We arrived just before lunch time so we bought some food and enjoyed the (unexpected) beautiful weather by having a picnic on the river. We had some fun feeding the ducks and even saw an otter before making our way across the bridge to the old town: Cité de Carcassonne.
The Cité de Carcassonne is absolutely stunning. It is a city built inside two outer walls, with over 50 towers, a cathedral and the best Castle I have seen in my life! We wandered through the thin, cobbled streets and made our way to the Castle. France has a wonderful system in that people under 26 get in free or at a highly reduced price to a lot of the cultural sites so we got in for free 🙂 Though this is definitely a castle that I would recommend to anyone, free or not. It was beautiful with courtyards, high walls and stunning views to Carcassonne and the pyrennees mountains.
From the castle you have access to the walls that surround the Cité de Carcassonne so we were able to walk these as well.What we didn’t know is that you can’t go the whole way around, so we walked three quarters of the way around only to have to turn round and come back again!
From the top of one of the Castle towers we spotted a church with a bell tower, so after lunch we headed of to find it in the hope that we would be able to look back on the Cité de Carcassonne and have a lovely view. We were right, the view was amazing, aided by the fact the sun was about to set, Carcassonne looked Beautiful! Well worth the 233 exhausting steps to the top of the tower.
As Carcassonne doesn’t have much in the way of Hostels and because we love Toulouse so much, we caught the train back up as far as Toulouse for the evening and stayed in the same Hostel that we stayed in when we went in December. We napped, cooked ourselves a nice meal and headed into Toulouse for the evening. The Christmas Markets where all gone so we were able to see Place du Capitole as it is meant to be – even more beautiful.
The next morning we were off again on our way back to Perigueux, seems like most of my life here is spent on trains! I wouldn’t change it though, I love that I am getting to see all these places! Every weekend in Stirling next year is going to be a shock to my system!
C'EST LA VIE 