June 16th –
This was our last day visiting with Hervé, Katia, and the two daughters. Before leaving though, we took a short tour of part of the castle which surrounds the city. It was pretty neat to walk along the outer wall of the castle. If you happen to ever visit France, I would recommend Carcassonne. It really is a unique city.
We arrived in Montredon around 12:30, and soon it was time for lunch. A lot of people reading this will cringe at the thought of eating this meal, but to the French, there is nothing weird about eating horse. This isn’t my first time eating it either, and at least this time it was cooked as a steak. However, I seemed to get a really difficult piece to chew, so I ended up not eating a lot of it. Will helped me finish my steak, thankfully. The taste was fine; I just have trouble eating really chewy food.
After lunch, Hervé and Katia wanted to take us to the “mystery spot”. They told us it was about 30 km away, but the drive seemed a lot longer than that. It also went from a sunny day to cloudy and it was raining by the time we reached the “spot”. It’s one of those places that are like an optical illusion. It looks like the road is uphill (although it really didn’t look like much of an incline to me), but when you put the car in neutral, it will start to roll “up” the street. When coming back, you have to accelerate the car in order to get back “down” the slight hill. It was weird being in the car for this strange phenomena. I know it’s just an optical illusion, but it was still pretty neat to see. We stopped at the nearest town, Minèrve, and we walked around for a little bit. There’s not a whole lot to see there, but it was a cute little town.
We went back to their house for just a little bit after that, and then said our goodbyes before heading back to Carcassonne. We had dinner at a restaurant in town, and Will and I had some cassoulet since it will be a long time before we will have that dish again. The couple next to us was a French man and a Romanian woman, and they had a bet about whether other people knew anything about Romania besides the cars that come from there. Luckily for the woman, they were sitting next to two world travelers, Will and his dad, who have actually been to Romania. It’s a good thing she wasn’t just asking me because sadly, I don’t know anything about Romania.
Since it was our last night in Carcassonne, we needed to spend the credit that was given to us for the bar in the hotel. Will’s dad decided to order a white wine that was 43 years old (Will’s age + my age in a couple months). So it was a bottle from 1966... what madness! There was nobody in the bar, and the bartender said we could come with him to get the wine in the cellar. Of course we took him up on the opportunity! The door that lead downstairs was one of those hidden doors that look like a bookshelf. It was really neat getting to go down and see the wine cellars. There was so much wine down there, and we also passed a room with a huge cake in the shape of the castle. We asked the bartender about it on the way out and he said it was a wedding cake. Then he asked if we wanted some chocolate to go with the wine, and he showed us a room that had trays and trays of chocolates. I was in heaven! So he gathered a tray of chocolates for us, and we headed back up to the bar.
Then it was time to enjoy the wine and chocolate. I couldn’t believe I was drinking such old wine. I also discovered something since this was the first time having a glass of white wine. It is a lot easier to drink than red wine. It was a lot sweeter than red, although Will told me that wine is a lot sweeter than most of the white wines I will drink back home. Can you believe I drank two glasses of it (once again, I’m a wild woman)? We had a good time that night, and it was a real treat that we were able to explore the wine cellars.
No comments:
Post a Comment