Category: Occitanie

We are going to spend the next few days traveling slowly thru central France. This rugged region is full of river valleys and steep hills. There are over a 1000 castles and ruins in the region, but they tend to be on a smaller scale than the big castles in the Loire Valley and around Paris. It is also one of the least visited parts of France by foreign tourists.

Cahors is located on a U-turn on the Lot river and was originally founded by the Celts. It has been around for a lot of history, but nothing particularly interesting has happened here during history.

It was a short drive down from Toulouse, but we left early because today was market day in Cahors and we wanted to arrive while the market was in full swing. We quickly checked in and set up François before walking the 2 kilometers back to town.

As we got closer to town we passed more and more people with baskets of groceries and fresh flowers. The market was quite large and the products on sale were very diverse. The regional specialty is duck and geese with all of the different things you can get from those animals including Foie Gras. We are not big fans of it, but we did get talked into taking a sample and I have to admit it was delicious, though we won’t be buying any.

These markets are always a lot of fun. In addition to being a good source of fresh foods that support the local farmers, it is always a big social event. We were really lucky as they were also having a festival celebrating the local bicycle clubs so in addition to the good food there were some other interesting displays as well as live jazz all day. While we were wandering around town at least 4 different jazz bands played. It seems these days jazz is more popular in Europe than in the US.

The biggest attraction in Cahors is the Valentre bridge over the Lot. It is a medieval bridge with three towers. Many bridges of this era had towers on them, partially for defense, and partially to collect tolls for their use. These days very few of the towers survive.

The bridge was quite a construction project for its age. There is a local story that the architect of the bridge was falling behind so he pledged his soul to the devil if the bridge was completed on time. So the devil intervened and the bridge was completed on time, but the architect reneged on the deal and kept his soul. This caused the devil to put a curse on his family. To honor this story a small statue of the devil is located high up on one of the towers.

While Ton was shooting pictures I was doing my normal gazing at people and things when a very dapper French couple in their 80’s asked me to take their picture. I was happy to oblige and they were very grateful. While I was taking their picture Ton had found a very nice place to pose, and she convinced them to pose for her to take their picture. When she showed them the picture they exclaimed Superb which in French sounds even better than English. Unfortunately she used their camera so we don’t have the picture for our use. We passed them several times and they would show us more pictures they had taken. They were a fun and very cute encounter today.

We finished off the day with a wine tasting at the visitors center. We were given five tastings of local wine for free. The region is know for Malbec which is most famously produced in Argentina. Ton has never been a fan of Malbec, but I was hoping French Malbec would change her mind. It didn’t, the reds were too dry for her taste though she did enjoy a Rose from the region.

Toulouse is the fourth largest city in France and we had never visited it, though we have driven thru it many times in our comings and goings in France. It is the hub of the French aerospace industry and has the French equivalent of NASA it is not on the tourism path in a big way possibly because it is too far inland for cruise ships to come here on day trips.

Ton did her normal planning for the visit, and I did the navigation. We spent several pleasant hours downtown visiting all of the normal things we go to look at in European cities.

The weather was nice again by the afternoon and there were a lot of people in the streets shopping and enjoying their lunch. Toulouse has several prominent churches and we poked into a couple of them and they were very nice.

The streets were very busy but there was a noticeable absence of guided groups, in fact the only one we saw today was from Lebanon which was a first for us. There was a tourist presence and we heard plenty of American accented English, but it was mostly couples or small groups traveling independently.

What we did notice was the very high percentage of young people on the streets. Toulouse is home to several universities and the number of students is supposed to be around 100,000. So there was a youthful energy to the town that we really enjoyed. A lot of the American accented English we heard came from younger people rather than middle aged and senior people, which we also enjoyed.

After walking it for a few hours we were surprised that it does not attract more visitors than it does. It is a great walkable downtown with interesting and unique architecture, nice old churches, and good food; all of the things that visitors love. But on the other hand we were glad it didn’t attract thousands of visitors in busses to crowd the center. It is a beautiful city that deserves a visit, and hopefully it will continue to strike the right balance without getting overwhelmed with visitors.

Unexpectedly today was about the drive. The drive from Andorra to Toulouse was only about 180 kilometers but google had it at nearly 3 hours in a car so I had an idea that it might be an interesting 3 hours. We were not in a big hurry to get going because as we reenter France we have to deal with the French lunch. Many campgrounds close for 2 to 3 hours mid-day, the one we were aiming at was closed from noon to 2:30 according to their website.

We spent about 30 minutes steadily climbing out of the valley we had been in towards the ski resort part of Andorra which is closer to France. The roads were pretty good. After we passed thru the ski-resorts the road began to climb even more. When we first saw the snow in front of us I told Ton we probably wouldn’t get that high but we nearly did.

We would have climbed up to the snow but we instead opted to take an expensive tunnel that kept us from continuing to climb. We were in the minority as most traffic opted to take a long series of switchbacks over the mountain we drove thru. As we were pulling into the toll booth the light rain we had been driving in was starting to turn into snow flurries so I felt ok with our choice to be wimps.

As soon as we exited the tunnel we entered France, though we did go thru an unmanned border crossing a couple of kilometers later. The drive down was on steep roads with a fair amount of switchbacks, for a few kilometers it was quite foggy which had our speeds down to a crawl. After the fog it rained most of the way down into Toulouse.

Despite the weather and the steep road we were still ahead of our 2:30 arrival so I pulled into a SuperU grocery to allow Ton some recreational shopping. After about 45 minutes we left with a handful of things including some white Asparagus that Ton wants to try her hand at cooking.

We finally arrived at the campground about 3pm only to find that it was still closed. I found a place on the road to park and walked up to the gate to see if I could see anyone. I finally located a maintenance guy who opened the gate and showed us to a spot and told me to go pay at 5pm.