Carcassonne

There was a camping aires right outside the city walls of the wonderfully persevered town of Carcassonne. However, since we are still out of butane, we had dinner at a McDonalds and got caught up on emails and the like before heading to it. It started to get dark out so we made our way to find the camping aires, this should have been easy but our GPS wasn’t guiding us to the right spot so it took us at least 20 minutes to find. It was 10 euros to park, but the site offered WC, a dump station, water and even electricity. After dumping our waste water tank, I decided that it would be a good idea to use the electricity provided. Since I didn’t want to occupy the dump station in case another campervan showed up, I took the spot directly next to it, which was for busses. To use the electricity you had to press a button for 15 minutes of use. We did this for around 3 hours, it did get frustrating, but we were able to run our electric heater, so we weren’t complaining too much. It was late and our van is pretty loud when it’s running, so when we decided to move out of the bus parking spot and over to a camper one this made Julie nervous. Seeing as the parking lot was on a slope, all I had to do was release the E-brake and roll. Julie found this really funny and she felt like she was in a spy movie, rolling silently in the night. We haven’t had many complaints about the van of late, but since it really ruins our moods for a few days we try our best not to “annoy” others. Trust me, we do feel stupid sometimes for even caring, but it’s just us.

The next morning we visited Carcassonne. If the town didn’t allow any cars, trucks or any form of motorized transportation inside the walls, it would have been just magical. There are tourist shops and museums that seem to be in every town (medieval, torture etc) and you can normally look past them, but dodging cars kind of sticks out in your memories. When we were getting information at the tourist office located in the base of one of the large towers next to the main drawbridge/entrance, a tour group came in, the lady at the counter though, was complaining to us because the guide isn’t allowed to take people into the tourist office on his tours. What was funny, is that the tourists were taking pictures of the tourist booth, can’t imagine why you would want to remember that. We made our way to the castle and met a real angry woman behind the counter. I’m not too sure what Julie said to her, but I could tell that it wasn’t going well. Julie wasn’t sure what she had done either so we trumped it up to her having a bad day. The castle was nice to explore, although it was really just walking along the walls. It did provide some pretty nice views of the old medieval town and the new town below. There wasn’t much else to see after that, so we walked around the perimeter and back to the van.

Our next stop was Valderies, where there was a free aires. The drive was only 151km, but it took us well over 3 hours and a tank of gas. The drive was mostly done on winding roads through mountains and hills. We managed to get some information from a hardware store as to where we could get our butane tank exchanged for a full one (they didn’t have any full ones in stock). The ladies took about 10 minutes explaining to Julie the directions, along with a detailed drawn map. We found the campervan store with out any problems and now we finally have fuel to cook our food. We decided to press our luck and asked the gentleman if he knew of a place we could get our propane tanks filled, he gave Julie verbal directions and a name, that’s it. We could not find the place and asked someone in the area if they had heard of it, and it turns out they hadn’t. This was funny, because I had commented earlier on how long the ladies took giving Julie such detailed directions and that a guy wouldn’t go to all that trouble. Julie now only wants to get directions from women.

When we arrived in Valderies it was windy, cold and raining. We located the parking area, which seemed to be in the center of town. The next morning we went to the bakery in the square and picked up a healthy breakfast of croissants and a pastry filled with nutella chocolate. The lady told Julie that she hadn’t spoken English in 30 years and I have to say she did a pretty good job in telling me how much I owed.