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October 11th – Day Forty-five
What is there to do in Carcassonne?
We need to be heading back up north. Our self-imposed
isolation has to end. We are still testing positive. It has been over two weeks
now but the lines are much fainter. We have well and truly passed the
infectious stage. It is time to go.
Up by 7am; packed away and over the waste drain by 0730.
Having not kept up with the news for the last fortnight here
or in France, the French fuel strikes come as a big shock to us. We have a
quarter of a tank left! Ho hum!
We find the nearest petrol station using an app that a French
motorhomer shared with us and we queue for thirty minutes. The queue is six
deep and stretches for two hundred metres down the access road.
Only we could pick the petrol station where the pumps are
antiquated. It takes me 15 minutes, no seriously, fifteen minutes to fill the
tank. It’s chaos. Fuel spillages below the pumps make it treacherous under
foot. People are frustrated and desperate. There is a 30-euro fuel cut off per
car. I’m not aware of this and neither is my pump. 60 euros later and I have
become the centre of good natured and good-humoured French banter! And the butt
of some BREXIT jokes. I stop at sixty euros. I could have filled the tank but
as soon as I am made aware of the limit at all the other pumps, I stop – it so
happens at 60 euros. People are now jostling behind us for our pump. It is the
‘magic’ pump. A bit like the magic genie lamp. Everyone wants it!
It is our first big distance drive in over a fortnight and so
I take it slowly. We stop off frequently at roadside Aires and call in at
Carcassonne, parking in the coach park Aire, a five-minute walk to the citadel.
We are really excited about visiting Carcassonne but
strangely it disappoints us; we find it almost Disney-fied for want of a better
term. A right tourist trap. The battlements
are good; the streets within, over commercialised. There is a little church
with stunning stain glass windows though. We find it all a little expensive,
tacky, overrated and disappointing but we manage to find a nice Templar Knight
tapestry for number one son. He’s a historian – he’ll be pleased with it. The
Knights Templar are one of his interests.
We spend an hour in Carcassonne. That’s it. We have probably done it an injustice.
A helpful note to those visiting Toulouse. One of the LeClerc’s,
Carcassonne Sud, is now closed and you have to go around five hundred metres
back up the road to a new purpose-built retail shopping centre where you will
find a new one there.
Useful information:
Route: D2 – A9 – A61 – D6113 to Carcassonne and then
A61 – D813 to Toulouse
Distance: 142 miles
Costs: campsite 72 euros; fuel 60 euros
Useful websites: https://www.searchforsites.co.uk/marker.php?id=33170
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