Minerve at night

A surprisingly smooth set of travel arrangements saw Cathy and I arrive here in the Minervois almost without hitch.  

The only frustration we experienced was at the Europcar desk at Toulouse where collecting our hire car took an hour despite it having been pre-booked and pre-paid.  The delay appeared to be in no small part down to the staff's insistence on trying to "upsell" to every customer - a more expensive car at a discounted rate, a sat nav, more comprehensive insurance etc.  As you can tell, I found this particularly frustrating as we had selected what we needed on line already and just wanted to pick up our keys and get going.  

Still, that said, we still arrived here in the light in time to join my cousin John and his Wife Wendy for a quick pre-dinner drink.

Then it was off to restaurant Chantovent at Minerve for a delightful meal.  I did take a number of unsatisfactory pictures of both the restaurant and Minerve in the dark before I realised that I had previously set the camera to full manual ...  Having worked that out things improved somewhat!  While it seems unlikely it may perhaps be that alcohol impaired my thought processes slightly ...

The meal over, we returned to the car park to drive back to John's place.  The car park is free at night, but operates a barrier system.  When we came to exit the barrier refused to raise.  The Payage machine confirmed that the ticket was good and that there was nothing to pay, but the barrier stayed down.  Tips were offered and advice given - but no matter what any of us tried, the barrier said resolutely down.  In the end some carefully applied leverage resolved the problem without actually breaking anything ....