No breakfast at l’Hostalet this morning. Anne remembered a patisserie near Place Gambetta. The great thing here was that the patisserie owns the cafe just across the lane, so you can select what you want in the patisserie and sit down and eat it with a coffee, one payment. That solves a problem we have in France where you can’t combine your patisserie purchase with a civilised coffee. If you want to sit down with a coffee at a cafe, you can’t really consume your patisserie purchases there. In Australia, since hot bread shops turned into bakeries and installed espresso machines in the early 90’s, we have not had that problem, but our bakeries just aren’t the same.
We drove to Banyuls sur Mer, Port Vendre and Collioures, all just a few km from Argeles sur Mer. Leaving Argeles, I was waved around a T intersection by a bus driver. OK, I’m on his right. At the next T intersection a lady driver waved me around. She was on my right. I hesitated then made my left turn. In my retroviseur I saw the triangular silhouette of her Cedez le Passage sign. How could I know about that? I just hope they see the red number plates and forgive me my lack of French clairvoyance. Silhouette, clairvoyance, I’m learning French!
Everyone who has been there likes Collioure. It has everything: vineyard covered hills meeting the ocean, a hilltop castle, a fort, a windmill, a beach, a harbour, access by rail, easy access to the Pyrenees and Spain for motorcycling. No surf, I guess, problems with parking too. The Centre for Functional Reorientation on our left as we drove in sounds positively Orwellian.
We stayed just an hour or so to refresh our memory of Collioure, then began the drive up to Toulouse via Narbonne. Still in Collioure, the car ahead of us had a near miss with an oncoming car 60cm on our side of the centre line. I couldn’t see daylight between them, but they didn’t stop. There was a problem near Narbonne, where we went through two or three large, congested new roundabouts that Camille didn’t know about. She got disoriented, we got confused, and decided to follow the N900 signs until she regained her composure. For the 170km run on the A61 to Toulouse I set the cruise to 133, a true 126. One advantage of an after market GPS over an integrated one is that it gives you your true speed, independently of the car’s speedo, which usually reads 5% fast according to my iphone speedo app.
As the familiar outline of Carcassonne Castle went by on our right, my Johnny Cash triple CD was playing. Anne hoped the rest of the trip would pass quickly. Camille delivered us to the BnB hotel on the Canal du Midi, about 30 minutes walk north of the Centre.
We checked in at about 2:45pm, but the room wasn’t ready, so we left our valises in the car and walked toward the city centre. The walk went through a Japanese garden, very well tended. I was nearly struck and killed by a swift French jogger.
On the canal towpath we witnessed an altercation between two dogs, and their owners. The perp was a German Shepherd which got out of control of its young female owner and took a mouthful of fur from the Briard. We didn’t have a dog in this fight, so stood by until it was safe to pass, but ready to intervene if the Briard’s owner got violent, as it seemed he might. He later complained to us in English that there is no longer civility in France.
We needed a sit-down, but all the tables at the bars in the square near the cathedral were occupied, so we tried, for the first time, a Salon de The. This was the solution we had overlooked. Patisserie items and tea, coffee or drinks in the one place, in genteel surroundings (why we hadn’t felt we belonged in one). The opposite of a bar, where we sometimes weren’t comfortable either.
After a coffee and an almond pastry, I still needed a large beer. It was 32 degrees. We found a bar right next to the B line Francois Verdier metro station just near the cathedral. We sat down at one of the tables outside and waited for service. There wasn’t any, but a waitress brought a couple of trays of drinks to customers on other tables. A lady sat down next to us and smoked. She was just using their furniture, but left coins on the table. Finally I went in and used my fluent French to buy a pint of Stella Artois, and good it was too.
Then it was time to figure out the Metro and get home. Four stations north, 10 minutes walk and we were back at the hotel. Now room 78 was clean, but uninhabitable. It smelt like a sewer. Some problem in the plumbing. They gave us room 92, a bigger room at the front with a view over the Canal. We’re happy. I’ll have to remember that ruse when I want a room upgrade in future. A can of air putrifier. The hotel is much better than we expected from its 7.8 Booking.com rating. The room is modern, clean, in good condition, air conditioned, with stellar wifi, a comfy Queen bed, in a nice location, walkable to the centre and metro, and not expensive. So many reviews said it was fine, no problems, then gave it a low rating. If breakfast is OK I’ll rate it 9.6, to help improve its average.
