Cycling on the Midi from Carcassonne to Toulouse, and towards Revel - April 1-8 2014
This was a great, varied holiday!
We arrived at Carcassonne from Liverpool, on the silly o’cloche flight, so our first day was relaxed, to say the least of it. We got off to a bad start by going to the toilet on arrival, confidently expecting the navette to wait a decent amount of time, like the one at Tours, which waited half an hour after the flight arrived. Not this boyo, however: he had gone by the time we had got back. Ah well, after a bit of tired dithering, we got a taxi and off to town.
I’d done lots of research before hand, and found an interesting arty little eating place in the middle of a residential area, which makes a point of using local seasonal garden produce, which seems to be becoming quite a vogue in France, and good for them, say I. You get the idea of allotments and garden produce from the street names here - Rue de l’Horte, Rue des Mimosas, Chemin des Clematites, Rue des Myrtilles, Le Clos des Framboisiers, Rue des Glycines.
We had a meal on a plate really - basically a hearty salad with a small bowl of courgette soup which I took for dressing and started sloshing over the already dressed lettuce until I noticed it was steaming! We really were tired after a 03:45 start. In among the salad was a generous slice of delicious saumon-asperge tarte, and a wedge of a very Lancashire like semi-hard cheese and some slices of pear. All washed down with trendy fruit juices at the smoothy end of the juice spectrum, this was great.
We then stopped to sleep it off in Garden Street before waddling back into town to pick up the bikes. Angie needed 3 more micro snores on the way, but we made it eventually, and got the bikes from the same place we used when we went east on the canal to Narbonne in 2008.
By the time we had sleep-walked back to the station and watched a few dogs charging round the place where they were officially interdits, though they didn’t seem to care about that, we were onto the five o’clock train, which got us to Villefranche de Lauragais at a civilised time. Villefranche is 67 km west of Carcassonne, about two thirds of the way to Toulouse. There is an ancient church with a clocher mur that is worth a look and presumably a listen -
We managed to get lost a few times in the 300 metres from la gare to the house, but if streets will keep changing their noms, qu’est-ce qu’on expect?
The French term chambres d’hôte is sadly undervalued by Google which translates it as “bed and breakfasts”. The three chambres d’hote that we stayed at offered miles more than B&B. Admittedly we chose places that offered evening meals as well, and this was the best choice we made in this holiday by far.
The place where we stayed in Villefranche de Lauragais was the ultra comfortable home of a charming couple somewhere near retirement age. Their son lived up the road at Avignonet de Lauragais, which is an interesting little place, one stop east on the train towards Carcassonne. It’s a sleepy little village with an imposing wind farm which is leaning-tower-of-Pisa-breathtakingly close to the village. They would never get planning for it in the UK, that’s for sure, but it didn’t even raise a Gallic shrug when I asked what they thought about it. Despite this abundance of electricity, there was a power cut in Avignonet while we were there, and our hosts’ son came round to borrow chandelles, like you do.
Avignonet’s main claims to fame are the ancient church, the remains of a very ancient tower, and the fierce local heroes who slaughtered the visiting Inquisition posse in their beds when they dropped by in 1242 for a quick bit of torture and burning at the stake. Or do the French burn at the steak?
We also met their grand fils, a spirited little fellow who, when asked by grande mère to stay in the garden with us while she went inside for the key to the garage, issued a determined nolle prosequi as Jeeves would put it, and turned tail in pursuit of the disappearing apron strings.
We had the whole of the top floor of the house to ourselves - a nice airy (not to say windy) shuttered bedroom, a reading room with some books of the local countryside and sights, and a nice shower room etc. Not bad for 60 euros including a sumptuous breakfast, all “maison”!
The evening meal was properly introduced with aperitifs in front of the wood burning cheminée. Feu de bois seems to be big business in France. Two places proudly told us their chimneys were professionally installed by cheminiers, and they were surprised that this wasn’t all the go in England. The Villefranche chimney was a strange fan assisted affair, which seemed a bit contrived, but was very nice and warm once it was going.
We were offered a choice of muscat or an orange concoction, which turned out to be “maison” as well, to our amazement, as it was thoroughly delicious to the extent that the muscat never got an outing on either evening. Avec ça we had a selection of olives, all very civilised.
Conversation was quite difficult on the first evening, partly because of the years of rust that have settled on what remains of my schoolboy French, and partly because it takes a while to fully realise that you are linguistically in it up to your neck and the only thing to do is to go for it. Dans pour un penny, dans pour un livre, so to speak. These lovely hosts were misguidedly giving us the benefit of the doubt as to whether we were capable of having a comprehensible conversation, let alone a civilised one. It came as a bit of a shock, I have to say, to be treated as a dinner guest as opposed to a paying guest. But it was actually very nice indeed, and it gave us a French experience that we will certainly never have again, if we get what we deserve in future!
Dinner on the first night was a splendid affair. The starter was a lavish salad with walnuts and various interesting meaty bits, quite capable of standing for a main course, and beautifully presented. Our dear hostess Elisabeth was a real star in the kitchen, and totally on top of the job. The main course, which completely finished poor Angie off, was duck breast “cuitte moyen”, which of course means waved in front of the gas. It was beautifully red in the middle, and most of the way to the edge as well, but completely succulent and delicious, and somehow the brazen slab of fat that comes with it was also quite approachable, though even I couldn’t face polishing it all off. Really a gorgeous plat! The jug of red wine circulated with a pleasing regularity while all this went on - or down. Pudding was really de trop after that, but she wheeled in a strawberry tarte, which was more effort that it repaid, sadly, but if you will use Spanish strawberries in April, that’s going to happen. The pastry was more like it, and the whole was held together with a delicious baker’s custard of some sort. This would have been quite something in the summer.
We beat a hasty retrait and after a quick debrief and licking of linguistic wounds, set about catching up with some Zs.
Day two was our first proper try out of the bikes. Elisabeth was extremely dubious about the practicality of going on a bike at all in the strong wind, and suggested we should throw our plan out and go to Toulouse, the pink capital of the region, on the train instead. Being British, however, we poopooed the idea of it being too windy, and felt sure felt we would manage somehow, especially as we were well stoked up on a great breakfast of apricot bread maison, really pure beurre croissants, lovely straightforward yoghurt maison, 4 excellent confitures maison and jardin, and rich chocolate cake, avec son icing. The only thing that was wrong with the jam - and this seems to be endemic in the region - was that it was violently sweet. God only knows how much sugar the French get through, but there seems to be enough in a breakfast to keep an army on the march for a week.
After getting lost a couple of times on the way back to the station, we eventually found our way to the Canal du Midi, which is a little south of the railway at Villefranche, and completely unmissable on the map, but not with me navigating. By this time, the reality of the wind was beginning to sink in. This was one of those winds that blows you off your feet, and is definitely not designed for riding into as we were doing at this point. Fortune, however, favours the foolhardy, and having battled man and womanfully into the wind until we reached the canal, we then had the good fortune to turn and start going the same way as the wind. It seemed to be in more of a hurry than we were, but once we actually went west and got it on our backs, it was as though the troubles of the world had been lifted off our shoulders, and pedalling was suddenly not only easy but completely unnecessary. We rouled doucement along all the way to Toulouse, which was about twice as far as I had planned, with scarcely a pedal the whole way. This was the longest ride we’ve ever done, by some distance, and we arrived “as fresh as some cucumbers” as Anatole, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia’s French cook would say. And we made such speed that we had time to tie up the (t)rusty steeds and take a tour of the Capitole - theatre, square and gallery all in one, and all libre au public.
We also had time to go north to see the Basilica of St Sernin, which is a fascinating building, steeped in many centuries of history, and decked out with some very interesting modern stations of the cross, all done with about 5 or 6 brush strokes per station. We didn’t quite have time for a look at the Garonne or the other canals that all join up in Toulouse, so we headed back to the gare, boldly using the cycle lanes which are very well spread across the city. Toulouse is very serious about being bike friendly. They have a Boris Bike scheme - 2 hours for a euro, and a euro an hour after that. And they are all over the place. It even feels safe to ride as well, which would be a great claim for any comparable British city.
I did my good deed for the day by helping a French couple work out how the queue for rail info worked - a bit like a trip to the deli at Sainsbury’s combined with Argos - and got some tickets back to Villefranche de Lauragais in time for a repeat performance on the dinner front.
This is what our route looked like -
The lower line is us being blown along the canal, and the upper line is the train taking the strain on the way back. The balloon is where we were staying. Notice the 51 miles stat on the right, and the broadly flat altitude profile, both supplied by the incomparable ViewRanger programme which did stirling work for me on my Nexus, completely transforming the horrors of map reading. With this beast you can now see exactly where you are - not where you think you are - courtesy of a red circle showing your GPS location. And you can plan a route in advance, and record a track in real time. Getting lost just stops being a problem. Worth the cost of the Nexus on its own - and free, including the completely adequate cycle-centric map I downloaded in detail before we set off.
The second evening in Villefranche reintroduced the aperitifs theme, with a selection of saucissons this time, including an intriguing pork liver one which she assured us was “confit” and ergo special. This turned up at our second place as well, so it is clearly popular in the Aude region. The starter was a beautiful and very welcome bash at the asperge which is in season earlier over there. Elisabeth gave us a generous portion of about 8 of the thinner asperges, and a couple of slices of delicious saumon fumé. The main course, at our request, was lapin. We knew we had cassoulet wars ahead, so given the choice of cassoulet or rabbit, we went for the rabbit. This surprised both our hosts, who had formed the strong impression that all English pigs disliked rabbit.
The rabbit arrived on a huge plate, with sauté potatoes mixed in. There must have been about 4 rabbits involved in the dish, and only the prime cuts were there. It was quite succulent meat, which is what I was trying to express when I said the flesh was very sweet. Ironically, in the light of the breakfast experience, this seemed to go down quite badly, and I seem to have managed to convey “bland” in place of succulent. Oh well, don’t worry and carry on. I wasn’t too sure about the way the meat was covered with mustard and creme fraiche - this seemed a bit much to me, but it was still a very impressive dish indeed.
Pudding was something in the profiterole line, with a deliciously gooey sauce and ice cream. Terrific!
After another hearty breakfast we took our leave of Elisabeth and Villefranche, and headed out into the great unknown - a cross country ride north to St Amancet. I was a bit worried about this, because it was quite a long trip, and I wasn’t really that confident about the roads we would be using most of the way. I’d planned on taking the train to Avignonet to reduce the 30 km distance a bit, but by the time we had stocked up with biscuits, bread and cheese at the Spar and found our way to la gare, we had about 45 minutes to wait for the train. Angie was getting ants in her pants about getting started, so we set off east on the main road - completely forgetting about the pesky wind, which was blowing again with a vengeance, and underestimating the distance to Avignonet. Anyway, the train never seemed to turn up, so we probably did the right thing. It was pretty fierce with the wind in our faces, and by the time we reached Avignonet I was starting to think about how tired we would be at the other end.
After Avignonet we got off the main drag and onto country lanes, which was much more pleasant. Our route took us through a number of sleepy little places that barely deserved the name hamlet, let alone village. Airoux boasts a Church St and a Fountain St, and that just about says it all. This is the main drag in Soupex -
Somewhere along the way we found a nice corner with a good long view and had a simple cheese and bread lunch, which was just what the doctor ordered after the onslaught of the evening meals on the previous two days. After that it was downhill for a while, which is always welcome.
As we approached Revel from the south, we picked up the Rigole de la Plaine - a stream which feeds water down from the Bassin de Saint-Ferréol, a reservoir in the Montagne Noire built to feed the Canal du Midi. This is really big thinking. Start by drawing a line between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Build a canal along the line. Then build a reservoir to feed it, and a stream thirty miles long to carry the water to the canal. The canal is not flat. It goes up in the middle. This is what the canal looks like, with height on the Y axis and distance from the west on the X axis -
So the water has to be fed to the summit, and trickled down both sides. The point where this stream splits and joins the canal in both directions is called the Partage des Eaux, of which more later.
We followed the Rigole de la Plaine from where it crosses the main north-south road (D624) for as long as we could, taking us east below Revel. By now the weather had changed and there were heavy black clouds looming. The rain started on the Rigole and really caught up with us round Revel. We got a considerable soaking and just had to make the best of our way east through the village of Sorèze (of which more later) and to our second place, St Amancet.
This was what our route looked like on the second day -
St Amancet is another tiny little hamlet. It apparently had a nice estate a few hundred years back, to which our house was attached. There is evidence of there having once been a water mill, and plenty of streams all round. La Méjeane, where we stayed, is an old stone house with flagged floors and lots of really old nooks and crannies. Our hostess Chantal welcomed us in out of the rain, and was very good natured about the amount of water we sloshed around her house as we poured bucketfuls out of shoes and bags. The kettle was quickly on, and the feu de bois lit in our room, which was really welcome. It all seemed a bit ramshackled, I have to say, but one man’s ramshackled is another man’s unspoilt, and we soon warmed to the place, in more senses than one. We weren’t too sure about the old dog, which looked a bit flea ridden, and when we both started to feel we might have been bitten, we got quite disheartened. However, I can confirm that there are such things as psychosomatic fleas, and all was well in the end dogwise.
Chantal had asked us in advance if we wanted her cassoulet maison because it takes 3 days to prepare properly - the meat is all confit-ed on day 1, and the beans are soaked; on day 2 the beans are part cooked and combined with the meat; and on day 3 the dish goes in the oven for a number of hours. Heaven! Naturally I had committed enthusiastically to the cassoulet option. And it really lived up to expectations. There were just the two of us guests, plus Chantal and Gilles and their 15 year old daughter, who has the fabulous name of Lucy Loupe. Lucy made no concession at all to English speakers, so we scarcely caught a word she said, and she made it perfectly clear that she had no idea what the hell I was gibbering on about. A charming girl, really, but so like something out of the Catherine Tate show.
The meal started with aperitifs maison (blackcurrant and pear, both delicious) and a somewhat unpromising looking amuse-bouche of olive and tomato tapenades on bare faced sliced bread. In fact it was quite delicious, with both tapenades being of the highest quality, and the bread simply didn’t get in their way. Then came a massive salad with generously home made pork lardons - a star turn in its own right.
But the cassoulet was the main event of the evening. The meat was duck leg, pork rib (forget “a piece of lean and a piece of fatty”) and Toulouse sausage. The beans were absolutely full of fatty rich flavour, and the crust was really to die for. Chantal’s husband Gilles urged us amicalement to “servez-vous, servez-vous” and I for one didn’t need much encouragement. What a treat! This was followed by a chocolate mousse and a poumpet - a lemon and sugar puff pastry cake, for want of a better description. We saw these in a cake shop at Revel as well, and it is apparently a local speciality of the Tarn district. St Amancet is on the edge of the Tarn to the north and the Aude to the south. The pastry is folded in three over the butter, and the whole thing is sprinkled generously with sugar. A bit odd, but pleasant enough - another example of the French love affair with sugar, it seems.
Breakfast after this veritable feast was a considerably less grand business, with just bread, jam and waffles, though the jam was all good home made stuff, and frankly anything more would have been wasted on us we were so well fed the night before. Chantal wasn’t up for making her own bread, although she was interested to know what level my bread making was at - “was I using a levain” etc. She felt that having access to a good boulanger she should use him, which I suppose I agree with. But I don’t think her boulanger is as good as either the Staff of Life in Kendal or Filbert’s in Lancaster, both of which I think are outstandingly good.
The rain was still coming down after breakfast, so we reluctantly decided to draw a veil over our planned trip to the Bassin de St Ferreol, which was part of the whole exploration of the Canal du Midi theme that I had woven so seamlessly into the fabric of the holiday. Gilles had pointed out that it was a steep climb to St Ferreol from the east, and we should consider going west to Revel and approaching it from that side. I thought I would check this on ViewRanger, and he was quite right - the route I had planned up to the reservoir would have involved us in a really steep climb. In the end Chantal gave us a lift into Revel, and we spent the morning there, having a coffee and a wander round the shops and rather a nice little Musée du Bois et Marqueterie which my old dad would have liked. Among other things it included a section on the life of this jolly old local wood working walrus -
On the way back from Revel we stopped at a charming ancient village called Sorèze and wandered lonely as some clouds round the well tended streets. Everyone seems to have bought into the “France in bloom” scheme, or whatever their equivalent is called. The main attraction is the Abbaye-Ecole which is a spooky kind of combination of a seminary and military college. What’s that all about? It hosts a pretty good looking music festival in the summer. The 2011 programme was in our room, and it included a piece of Xenakis, which is saying something. They’re in the process of setting up a museum about an old boy called Dom Robert who seems to have been given a free rein with painting the walls of the Abbaye. They were apparently also quite relaxed about high class graffiti over the centuries, as the stone pillars round the courtyard are all carved with students’ names and dates -
This may have taken their minds off the pretty grim conditions. Their day started at 05:30 and studies continued till 20:30. Their cellules (aptly named) had a bed and room to swing about half a chat. No fenêtres, just a grill over the porte. There was a display of one poor lad’s school reports over a couple of years -
Mathématiques 0 sur 20
Français 1 sur 20
Position dans la classe 17 sur 17
The headmaster’s comment at the bottom was -
“Faible, très faible”
The swine! Give the lad some encouragement, you bully. And his letters home and the reply from home all made quite sad and sorry reading. “Dear Papa, Can’t I come home to Toulouse? I don’t like it here.”
Back home at St Amancet, we took a stroll round the hamlet. When Angie opened the front door, the old dog, which up till this point had looked like more of a snoozer-by-the-fire than anything, suddenly upped and offed like a dog on a mission. Chantal was quite serene about this, so he clearly had a friend in the village somewhere. We met up with him again by the church, where he was taking the air and making the water. This furnished us with a sujet de conversation for later.
Round the back of La Méjeane itself, the wise words of Ilias, our canny Greek guide on our Peloponnese holiday, came back to me - “every building tells its own story”. The stairs at the front of La Méjeane -
are clearly a later addition when you see them from behind, so someone a couple of hundred years ago turned a first floor window into a front door. Maybe they couldn’t get planning for a conversion without a fire escape!
Ilias’s greatest moment, by the way, was when he sowed the seed of doubt by suggesting that the reason most European olive oil said “from the EU” rather than “from Italy” or “from France” was that it was actually cut with top quality Greek olive oil to improve the quality. Never trust a Greek, even when bearing gifts, but especially when spreading propaganda about olive oil.
In the evening we returned to the engorgement theme with a vengeance. There were some extra guests - a French couple who were clearly going for it in their retirement. The old boy reckoned he was normally reined back at supper time by his better half, a bowl of soup and a yoghurt being about all he could normal hope for. His wife was a lot trimmer than him, and sported a Sarah Lund style sweater - you get the picture - and by God he meant to make up for it on holiday. So what with Gilles’ geniality (“servez-vous, servez-vous”) and Chantal’s generous nature in everything relating to food, and with a bit of the old entente cordiale and schoolboy Franglais between us two old boys out for a good blowout, the aperitifs and the conversation went round pretty freely, and the evening got off on a good footing. I’d caught a crafty look at the starter earlier, which starred a paté maison about the size of a family sized Melton Mowbray pork pie. This was lovingly swathed in slices of black pudding they’d be happy with in Bury (although an eyebrow might be raised at the coarseness of the cut); a white sausage which was largely bread and eggs, with a gentle meaty background; a spicy blood red pork saucisson and the confit pork liver one we had at Villefranche. This was an absolutely sensational plat, and could easily have been the main event at any meal. As I said in my review for Bookings.com, I would be happy to take a slice of the paté with me when / if I set off to the pearly gates. It was fabulous.
And there was more! Chantal’s described the main dish as “something which uses all the bits of pork that are left after the charcuterie has been taken off the pig”. The picture on her web site does not do it justice at all. Imagine this without what looks like a coating of Hellmann’s -
This is a fresinat, another Tarn speciality, and the following recipe gives a reasonable idea of what you might expect it to taste like -
Peel the potatoes. Cut into 1 cm cubes of 1 cm, rinse and dry. Fry them in a pan with 100g of duck fat for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, expand the pork into small squares rectangular. In another pan, fry in oil ¹ and let cook over medium heat, covered, for about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, chop the peeled garlic and parsley.
When cooked pork, increase the power of fire one last time to enter the meat after removing the cover.Sprinkle the meat and potatoes of the parsley, stir and serve immediately (garlic should remain raw).
Now hold that thought, and abstract it so you get the essence of what such a dish might aspire to. That’s what Chantal’s was like, God bless her and all who float off with her.
Opinions were divided on this one in the Taylor entourage. The phrase “Fry them in a pan with 100g of duck fat” may give you a clue as to what we disagreed about! For my part I think this was the best dish we had all week, by a considerable margin. If you are sensing “greasy”, think “rich”. It certainly was that, and succulent and .... no, it’s no good - these superlatives just aren’t up to the job at all. I would like this as my last meal, and if it’s cooked properly it stands a good chance of being just that. I’ll take my chances, and I’ll have the pate with me in a lunch box when I go.
God, how would you follow two such courses as that? With a top quality cheese board, of course! Chantal had been to the fromagerie big time: I wouldn’t mind the commission on her bill there. This evening she rolled out 4 belters.
There was a great tranche of something along the camembert / brie axis, from a large wheel, about 3 cm thick, with an orange tinge to the white skin, which looked like it might have been brine-washed along the way. I saw this at the market at Revel, where I visited the same fromager, and it was offered in two states - the orange which was jeune, and an older version, which was on the way to being yellow and which I was told was “plus fort”. Alongside this were a hardish vache something like a Comté, a youngish chèvre of this ilk -
and about 60 degrees of a truckle-shaped brebis -
So - soft and hard, cow, sheep and goat, and all of it fermier. Show me a British B&B that comes anywhere near even starting to cater to that standard.
Anyone mad enough not to want the cheese could have a shot at a very passable kiwi fruit purée, but there was not much business in that department. By this stage of the evening the conversation was almost exclusively about food, and Chantal was really just drifting away with happiness at the meal she had been first slaving and later slavering over. My hero! I don’t expect to eat another meal as satisfying as this one in a very long time.
The next morning we came with low expectations about breakfast, and frankly what did it matter anyway after the gargantuan feast of the night before? But with extra guests Chantal had made a bit more of an effort, and as well as the confiture as before, we were treated to more cheese. This time there was a very young round chèvre, which Angie made creditable inroads into, and an extremely young vache, looking more like fromage blanc than anything, which the other couple hogged, so I didn’t actually get a shot at that. The amazing thing is that Chantal has lashed out on 6 top cheeses for her guests - there can’t have been much change from 35 euros judging by what was on the table. Absolutely fantastic, I tell you!
After this it was time to hit the road again, and after the usual faff when we thought we’d lost something, connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting the bags, we finally set off “tout wobblant” on our vélos, back in the direction of Revel and the famous market.
The market square is right in the middle of the village, which is laid out on a grid. There is a big square wood-roofed structure that houses some stalls, and the whole thing spills out right across the square, with 5 rows of stalls in all, arranged back to back in 3 rings. It’s very bustling and great fun. Lots of really nice looking fruit and veg, of course, herbs galore, several excellent cheese stalls, olives - you name it. The rotisso stall had a bed of potatoes sautéeing in the chicken dripping. The health food option.
We picked up some cheese for lunch from the same source as Chantal’s board, some excellent country bread from a producer who was delighted to see my Breadman Pete teeshirt -
and green and black olives from someone who knew exactly what 150g looked like in a wooden ladle. The lady on the herb stall was less with it, and having kept me waiting for a good 10 minutes for my 2 euros 50 bag of herbes de Provence, gave me 2 euros 50 change from 4 euros. While I have lots of time for direct selling producers, I don’t have quite so much for eejits, so I left her to take the consequences of not concentrating at school, like that lad at the Abbaye-Ecole in Sorèze before her.
I was struck by the similarity between some not particularly French-looking traders who were screaming at their potential customers, virtually ordering them to buy their goods, and a butcher I saw in action in the Leeds market in the late 1990s. And the obligatory man selling omni-choppers is a well known market character. This one wasn’t for starting at 10 euros and astonishing us by coming down to 3, but “he wasn’t finished yet - not only a chopper, but a double ended peeler and …” was going into his 10 euro goody bag.
One thing I haven’t seen before was young whipper snappers being introduced to the business world at the soggy end by doing the muscle and for all I know character building job of mashing potatoes in bulk with a wooden spoon and doling out 5 euro plastic tubs-worths. That reminds me Angie created a wonderful word on this holiday: tuppenceworthfuls. How is it we have never discovered the need for such a richly be-meaninged word before?
From Revel we followed the Rigole de la Plaine back south towards the Canal du Midi, as far as the main road (D624), where we stopped for lunch, with the Rigole in front of us, the lock and la maison de l'éclusier to the left of us, and a bright yellow field of rape seed shimmering away across the water. Given the sun, great bread, cheese and olives, it doesn’t get much better than that. And with the magic of Google street view I can show you - see the bench towards the far end of the hedge on the left - the very spot.
The Rigole, while I think of it, is broadly along the pilgrim route to Santiago de Campostela. The French couple at Chantal’s were quite shirty about cyclists, and particularly pilgrim walkers on the roads - a hazard to God-fearing drivers, in her book. I kept my opinion to myself on that occasion.
After lunch, we crossed the main road and went off into the country, widely (and wisely) skirting the bottom of the Montagne Noir. As I doubt if I will ever get a more appropriate context in which to do so, I am now unashamedly going to roll out one of my favourite stories - forgive me if you are sick of this old chestnut. Once upon a time, I was queuing at the Cambridge cheese stall behind an American woman who had gone stir crazy, wanting a bit of every kind of fromage-action she could find. She asked the long suffering cheese man where a particular cheese came from and he replied, with a wistful look into the far distance, and a loving, lingering wipe of his cheese hatchet, “from the foothills of the Pyrénées”. I now understand, finally, what he was getting at. You really don’t want to mess with those foothills - particularly on a vélo tout confort.
We reached our third destination - St Martin Lalande, or its outskirts, sooner than we had expected, ViewRanger having safely taken us away from all hill like objects in our way, so we decided to pedal on “for England, home and beauty”, as the one legged beggar says in Ulysses, and take a look at Castelnaudary, self-styled capital of Cassoulet. The town itself is small and pretty ordinary, but it does sport a festival each summer where everyone and his dog eats themselves stupid on cassoulet for a week, so it can’t be all bad. The canal basin is its most interesting area, from what I saw, and with a bit of money pumped in it could be really attractive. There is a mad swan on the water, which really wants putting down. We also saw an otter, which was a first.
When the attentions of the mad swan got too much for us, we headed back out into the country to see what our next chambre d’hote would be like. We had pushed the bateau out a bit on this stage of the journey, as Angie has expressed a desire to get a bit of smooth along with the rough sometimes. As we approached the Domaine de la Capelle it was clear that the place had a commanding position, looking over a considerable amount of gently rolling campagne. And when we arrived, the building and grounds turned out to be really very swish indeed. We took a brief look at the campsite, which was empty apart from one Canadian camper van that rolled up while we were looking round.
Maryse, the boss (very much the boss, in fact) didn’t quite get off on the right foot, not really settling us in too well. But maybe she was playing a bit of a longer game, allowing the full glory of the place and the standard of the accommodation to work on us. I have to hand it to her - she was a bit in the position of Mr Darcy: she was prepared to share her home with us, but she deserved and expected some respect too! And to be fair, as we were the only guests, she very generously upgraded us into the best room, which had truly breathtaking views.
The room, and the house generally in fact, were really top notch. I kept thinking of Jennifer Aldridge and her new kitchen with the under-floor heating. This was not far off the mark either, as the snazzy feu de bois downstairs seemed to be providing some underfloor heating in our bathroom, which was a killing piece of luxe as far as Angie was concerned - she couldn’t stop talking about it.
Much to Angie’s chagrin, Maryse made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t even prepared to talk about us not choosing to eat her cassoulet maison. “Il FAUT le goûter ici”. She told us that the Canadian people that had just arrived had actually taken a detour on their holiday just to try the cassoulet that a friend had told them about. The fact was, of course, that the cassoulet had already been in the oven for several hours at this stage. Anyway, after 4 evenings of making conversation in French and having no control over what food was coming next, we were well used by now to going with the flow, so we chose the cassoulet. In fact it was a cassoulet meal deal - aperitifs, amuse-bouche, entrée, cassoulet, fromage, dessert and vin de bonne qualité all compris, so at 30 euros (as opposed to the 40 shown on this year’s menu) she really was doing us a blooming good deal. We had an excellent rosé by the fire in the living room, and a trendy slateful of paté and pain, both maison, and then mosied on through to what was in effect a kitchen dining area, although the proper cooking went on outside, everything being feu de bois, bien sûr. She rustled us up a really nice avocado salad - where do you get ripe avocados in April? These were really beautifully ripe. Then she disappeared to get the main event - or rather to get her husband Jacques to bring the main event from the feu outside round to the side door on the farm buggy. Quite a comical scene, if it hadn’t been so eminently practical. And it introduced us to the glorious comic husband figure. Angie dubbed him Pulcinello, not least because he had the conk, but also because he was such a roly poly fun character - like a bit part in a school play - “the queen my lord, is dead - here’s your cassoulet”. And off he wandered, into the night, to return at regular intervals over the next couple of days, fetching, carrying, and always bringing a merry can’t-talk-English bonhomie with him. A real card.
Back to the cassoulet. Sometimes great stuff doesn’t look great, and this was black round the edges, and the croûte looked like it had been in the oven a week, not the 6 or 7 hours Maryse later told us it took to finish a cassoulet. But once opened up, this was a truly special cassoulet - beans barely recognisable as beans any more, sausage and duck leg simply melting in the mouth. In particular the crispy fat on the duck, and even the skin of the sausage were heavenly - impossible to put into words, but you really knew that this felt like no other food you’d ever tasted. Absolutely fantastic, and Maryse was completely justified in writing off all competition in the cassoulet line - hers was incomparable.
When the cheese arrived, it was on a slate again, so I wasn’t expecting much beyond show. How wrong! The chèvre log was like a classy Caerphilly - soft and gooey round the edge, and fresh and tangy in the middle. Wonderful!
I thought that was it, but of course this was France, so dessert followed cheese. I explained to Maryse about the recent scandal when Mary Berry suggested cheese should come before dessert, and this led to a demonstration of Gallic arm waving, both horizontal and vertical, which reminded me of Hitler making a speech. Not a family in France would think of having cheese after dessert, she “assured” me. A repas consisted, she continued forcefully, of an entrée, un plat, fromage et dessert, and ça was ça. In the face of such conviction, and after such a meal, I didn’t press the point.
Breakfast at La Capelle was a very swish affair - elaborately prepared individual fruit salad and fruit-beswirled yoghurt, fine pancakes dusted with icing sugar and served on slates; rich, buttery Madeleine-style cakes, not too sweet; croissants; orange juice and café au lait. After stoking up on that, and taking a final look at the snow-capped Pyrénées from the living room -
- it was time to hit the road back south to the Canal du Midi again. For this part of the holiday, we were going to ride either side of Castelnaudary, west one day, east the next. We did the stretch from Carcassonne east to Narbonne in October 2008, and this year’s trip broadly covers Carcassonne west to Toulouse. Maryse suggested we aim for the Partage des Eaux, and Jacques really went for it in the conversation stakes by confirming “c’est beau”. This marvellous pithiness, expressing so much with so little, and with just the hint of a Gallic gesture, reminded me of the classic moment when a Paris waiter reacted to Angie ordering the lamb shank in red wine and garlic sauce with a gentle sigh - “ah!”, a wistful glance through the open window, thoughts of Nicole and what might have been, that summer, that lamb shank…
Where was I? Oh yes, the Partage des Eaux. Maryse showed us on the map where the Rigole de la Plaine trickles down the map to the summit of the canal - a couple of hours each way, she thought -
We spent 6 hours on the round trip, but this probably shows how much we enjoy the small details along the way, rather than how slowly we pedal. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.
Just east of the Castelnaudary basin is a four chamber lock, which is quite thrilling to see in operation. This is likely to be the first lock that most boat-hirers hit, and we watched an American crew go through. They were clearly having real problems telling left hand down from right hand down, as Leslie Phillips would have called it. Am I showing my age here, or is it just a Radio 4 Extra thing? I had a brief chat with the éclusier while they were coming through, and he cunningly used one hand gesture both to tell the Americans which hand needed to go down and to show me what he thought of them, and apparently all Americans, if you get my drift. Once the Americans were down the locks, a massive boat went up them, completely filling the lock -
The leaves on the plane trees were just starting to open, the very slightest dusting of green appearing during our visit. There is so much variety and simple beauty to be seen on the canal, it’s amazing. Along the way we heard a very strange noise, something like one of those party blowers that unroll as you blow, and squeak amusingly. On investigation, we found this was actually a lusty frog in the stream at the side of the towpath, blowing chewing gum bubbles with his cheeks, and calling for a bit of company.
Someone had set up this handy resting place at the bottom of their garden, and we stopped here for a simple lunch of bread and cheese. Irises were in full bloom all over the area - a real treat for me, as I’ve always loved them. Mum loved them and we had them in the back garden at home.I like the garden gnome in the white hat.
The engineering involved in the alimentation du canal is really impressive - the multiple chambers of the deeper locks, with their rounded sides because the straight sided prototypes collapsed; the scale and daring of the whole thing; the reservoir at the top and the barrage at the bottom; the ingenuity of splitting the water. This is the water from the rigole actually hitting the canal at Narouze -
And this is the split -
We crossed the canal at the Océan écluse, and headed back towards Castelnaudary. What I didn’t realise until I came across this blog after returning to England was that on this day’s cycling, we twice went literally straight past the front door of a second generation poterie making traditional cassoles. How this can have happened I just don’t know. And if I had noticed it, I would certainly have gone in and bought a cassole, even if I had to balance it on my head all the way back to Castelnaudary. To buy one’s own cassole on the Midi, from the producers - what could be better than that? Gutted doesn’t come close!
Dinner that evening was less “stretching”, on request - a salad and pudding - but being à la carte came in at roughly the same cost in the end. Maryse offered us a salad with duck hearts and gizzards, which I must say lost something in the translation. Of course, she assured us this was “maison”, and given the fact that she has a substantial cottage industry producing cassoulets for the trade, she must have quite a lot of hearts and gizzards to dispose of. Having had a blissful experience with Tim a few years back with a “salade volailles”, I thought this would probably turn out to be alright, and it did. I am firmly in the Bloom camp on this -
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
The pudding that followed was a beautifully rich panna cotta topped with pineapple, and served with an almond biscuit (maison, of course) that really stole the show. After that we took a stroll round the estate, and round the campsite, where there was a lot of frog action going on, and a nice sunset.
The final day started with an identical breakfast to the previous day, and the usual bag packing dramas. But we left La Capelle with very positive feelings indeed, and really enjoyed the countryside on the way back to the canal for the last time. By now we were getting quite confident about covering more distance than I had allowed for in the plan, and Angie suggested we repeated some of our westerly ride of the previous day before starting the easterly push towards Carcassonne. We made it as far as the Laurens écluse before heading back. This was just over a mile short of the poterie - who knows if we would have noticed it if we’d gone the extra mile on this trip?
The extra distance we added turned out to be just about right, not only because we had the best of the towpath up to Laurens lock, but also because we arrived at Bram, one station west of Carcassonne, in good time for our train back to Carcassonne. The towpath between Bram and Carcassonne is not really doable on bikes, so we had planned on letting the train prendre the souche. As it turned out this was an inspired choice. The sun on the canal was getting a bit insistent for one thing, and the train ride itself turned out to be one of the gems of the trip. The cycle storage was right at the front, so we were just behind the driver’s cabin. As it was warm, they had left the door open, so we could see the driver’s view of the rails, as well as the passengers’ view through the side windows. It was a bit like John Adams’ “A Short Ride in a Fast Machine” - high drama in fact. It’s surprising how much the camber affects the view out of the front window - you don’t get the same leaning-into-the-bend effect looking out the side at all. This was a great way to finish our travelling, and we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Back in Carcassonne we dropped the bikes off next door to the bike shop, as arranged, because the bike shop was closed on Mondays. Then off into town to our one and only hotel of the week. I’d tried to get a chambre d’hote, but the lovely place we went to in 2008 was “désolé” not to be able to take us, and a couple of others at the right end of town were also full. It was a nice enough place, but after the splendours we had had earlier in the week, it couldn’t avoid being a bit of a let down. The evening meal in Carcassonne was a bit of a disaster, but hey - one meal out of how many in a week? Not a bad average!
I’m afraid my plan got a bit thin at this end of the week, and I had failed to learn the route up the the old cité properly, which resulted in us doing quite a lot more walking than should have been necessary to get there and in particular back again. It is undeniably a lovely place, and well worth a visit. In a way being Monday and out of season was an advantage, as there were far fewer people milling about. Here’s a picture of Angie from our 2008 trip, included simply because she looks so nice -
And here’s another one of my girlie back home, all bucked up by the holiday, and full of the joys of Spring -
And in the interests of balance, here’s one of yours truly -
So there we are - a week on the bikes, lots of fun, lots of variety. Sun, wind, rain, feu de bois, gastronomie, duck fat. What more could you ask for. Vive la France!
