travel page four
In the spring of 2000 we made only our second trip to France. For years we had avoided France because of a conviction that the people there were unfriendly and grasping. This was proved wrong in 1998 when a two week visit to Brittany, Normandy, Loire Valley, and Paris was big success. The return trip had different goals. We began at Toulouse in the south and for a week we saw an area often ignored by tourists.
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| A suitable punishment? | Walls of Carcassonne |
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| Inside Carcassonne | Albi Pharmacy | Sarlat la-caneda |
The region to the south of Toulouse is in the shadow of the snow capped Pyrenees mountains. There we went a half mile deep into a cave to see wall art put there by the inhabitants 12,000 years before. This art did not compare favorably with the famed Altamira, Spain cave art which we were lucky to have seen many years ago when it was still open for viewing. We visited towns once populated by the ill fated Cathars, a Christian sect labeled as heretics, who were burned en masse in great pyres by the Pope's forces because they refused to accept the Pope as the head of Christianity. We saw the works of Toulouse-Lautrec in the museum at Albi and spent days in medieval villages.
The food was wonderful! A speciality of southwest France is the duck cassoulet which is worth the trip just to eat. Small intimate inns are everywhere.
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| River Tarn at Albi | Bridge at Cahors | Albi Street Carnival |
We took the train from Toulouse to Avignon in Provence. This city for hundreds of years was the capital of the Catholic Church. Today it is a busy center for tourism. We stayed in a quaint seven room hotel next to the Papal Palace for four nights and then moved on to Lyon and home.
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| Avignon, Papal Palace | Avignon, Streets at night | Gordes in Provence |