Carcassonne

We left our friends to their beautiful Castres house, and a mountain of Ikea furniture to build, and headed up into the mountains. We stopped at Lac de Montagnes and had a lovely afternoon: boozy lunch, followed by lazing in the shade reading while the kids swam in the lake. They had a great wooden playground in the lake, but our two were mostly interested in digging great earthworks at the water's edge. (Obviously we had no spades for them, but they have learnt early in life that standing near families that have brought lots of such equipment and looking really pathetic generally provokes generosity.)

Our drive home took us past Carcassonne. Well, it should have taken us past Carcassonne but owing to a momentary lapse of concentration and that famous French habit of signposting everything every 5 metres and then suddenly having no signposts at all at one, critical, junction - we found ourselves driving round and round the heart of Carcassonne.

The old city - shown above - is a marvellously preserved medieval walled city... or a Disney like reconstructed monstrosity, depending on who you listen to. I like it. No time to stop today but I'm hoping I've photoshopped this enough that it won't be too obvious it was taken through a car windscreen.

Backblips from our wonderfully tiring weekend with friends, recently moved to Castres from Ireland are:

Big scary cross
boules

In case our hosts read this, I won't mention anything about Mrs K going to buy croissants in her PJs (every day...) and will just thank them for a couple of days of laughing till my sides hurt and drinking till my head hurt. Perfect.