[« Sunday] [High-Low Tech Issues :0 »]

09/14/2004: "Saturday"

After makng a few more circuits than usually necessary, we finally made our way out of Albi and headed toward Carcassonne and environs. We continued to be amazed at the variety of the landscape here in what is called 'the south of France'. We took the smaller D118 roads for this very reason.

At noon we stopped at a auberge for lunch. We'd learned our lesson from Albi about waiting too late. As usual this is a pastime for the French and our lunch turned into a couple of hours.While in the restaurant we observed a young man's family preparing for his surprise birthday party, a middle aged woman eating alone ( for two hours), a couple who came in with their dog ( we later saw them again at Rennes Chateau eating lunch, and two couples sharing lunch together...one of the men reminded me of pictures I've seen of Picasso ( I know...he's Spanish but I've seen several around this area as this is near Spain).

Finally getting to our gite in Couiza, we met our hosts, Alli and Martin Woods. They've fixed the place up to be so nice for our home base here in France......so nice and friendly, too and with two samll children they home school.

Next we headed to Esperaza and found John out in the courtyard painting shutters with French blue paint. He told us where we could find the rest of our painting crew and we set out. we visited a while and had a glass of wine at tables outside a local establishment downstairs near the gite.

We planned to eat dinner (notice we eat a lot) in Couiza near our gite but it didn't even open for another half hour so we walked over to the nearest grocery and patisserie and bought fruit, bread, and pastery :>) for breakfast.......and wine.

We spent a LONG time on the blog and then it disappeared into the netherworld of the Internet never to be seen in that particular form again.....perhaps there will be an entry later for those first few days but it will never be the same at that time when we had our first impressions.