John's Carcassone

ON TO CARCASSONE.

It was 8.00am in the morning and dark and raining when we hit the road. I felt like we were in that film "The Heroes Of Telemark." where a small group of commandoes creep through the the cold mountain night to blow up a dam.   ... Not that we were going to blow anything up mind you. Even if the weather wasn't too good on that day, I was sure that there would be something interesting to see and do. I think things were a bit quiet because we were in a ski resort area in the off season. The upside was that we are not being squeezed and squashed by tourists. 

Imagine this. We were back on the coach. It was 3:40pm on a sleepy, sunny, Sunday afternoon. While Julie dozed beside me, I had been thinking how fortunate I was to be sitting on a coach cruising around Europe. Probably the good lunch and happiness of being back in France again had brought on the aura of contentment. It was so good to be cruising along the French countryside again, with the acres of vineyards stretching off into the distance, and the meandering country roads going off into who knows where. 

Carcassone is a Medieval walled city in the South of France. It is a place of Knights of old, chivalry, battles, and terrible things, all carried out in the name of God and the Catholic Church. A place where the Crusaders were the bad guys, and some other Catholics and non Catholics, the innocent. BUT, to lunch! 

Lunch was the traditional dish called Cassolet. A casserole style meal made if pork, duck, and white beans. If you had been brought up in Provence, and cooking it all your life it would look like this when you finish. The photo on top.

Here is the recipe if you would like to try!

A nice glass of the local red and a caramel dish (bottom photo) concluded our lunch quite nicely. Much better than the couple of bread rolls, and a coffee which is all I usually feel like having. 

To spend the night we went to a place called Montpellier, which I thought was basically another ski resort, however I was wrong about Montpellier being just a ski resort, it is in fact, a thriving city. As you can see from the photos it has its affluent and poorer centres sometimes "just over the wall." What appeared to be a crime and red light district was just a stone's throw from the gleaming edifice that was our hotel.