Our first stop was a city called Bouges. The city is very famous for a very large cathedral that sits in the middle of it. We were planning on visiting the inside of the cathedral; however, because we were navigating the electric car for the first day, we didn't make it there until it was already nighttime. After getting a nice dinner to start our vacation and wandering the ancient streets of the city, we headed out the next day for the national park.
We stayed about six minutes away from the most famous town in the national park, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie. This city has been around for eight or nine hundred years and has been a popular place for artists to frequent due to the city being situated right on the cliff overlooking the valley and the Lot River.
On our first day, due to the rain in the afternoon, once the weather had cleared, we went to town to find a bite to eat and then went on a hike around the Lot River, which cuts through the national park. There was some beautiful fall foliage, and the colors were really nice as it's the tail end of fall here in France. After our hike, we went to a very local grocery store that mostly just sold local wines and some other local products such as a lot of different types of foie gras.
On our second full day in the national park, we went to Château Cenevieres. This beautifully preserved chateau sits up on the hill and has a rich history of many different families ruling over the different centuries. In the afternoon, we went to a prehistoric cave, Pech Merle, that had been closed off 13,000 years ago and is really beautifully preserved. Some local boys about a century ago rediscovered the cave after crawling through hundreds of meters of rocks. It is very famous today because it has drawings from 29,000 years ago that are very well preserved. They have been able to use carbon dating to trace back how old these paintings on the cave walls are. This was both of our first times looking at prehistoric drawings in a cave.
In the evening, we went to a local bar instead of going to the tourist town where we were the first-ever customers to get the new menu item of pizza. Apparently, this had been a widely anticipated event in this small town, and after we ordered the pizza and it arrived, the whole bar clapped for us for ordering the pizza. I guess they figured that they would let the tourists try it first, and if it was any good, they would also take part. It's a rare occurrence that a bar will get a standing ovation for making a few pizzas for their patrons, but this was big news in this town. After we ate the pizza, a few locals invited us for a few games of pool, and then we headed back for our final night at our bed and breakfast before we would head off the next morning to Castelnaudary, a town located about 45 minutes away from Carcassonne.
On the way to Castelnaudary, we stopped in a few towns on the back roads in the National Park and then ended up going to a different National Park where there's a tunnel that's 400 years old that brings water to that region. This tunnel was known as an architectural wonder. We walked to a nearby dam and then I walked through the tunnel, which was a lot scarier than it appeared to be as it was quite narrow and pitch black. The whole experience was quite random but a nice journey on the side that we had found when clicking around on Google Maps on what we would pass on the way to Castelnaudary.
Once we arrived in Castelnaudary, we went out to dinner where I sampled the local cuisine. They are famous for this duck boiled in some white beans. We even found an hour away in Carcassonne that they were talking about this dish, and it was linked to this town of Castelnaudary. It was quite delicious if you could get over the not burn in your mouth in the clay pot.
The next day we finally went to our destination of Carcassonne, which would be really the final day of our touring before we would just head to mostly driving. Carcassonne dates back over a thousand years but was really built up in the 13th century. The French Inquisition has a huge history in this place. Many people were killed, and the inquisitors had completely taken over this city when they were in power. We toured the castle and then walked the walls on the outside of the city where we got beautiful landscapes of the actual town where people live in today that sits below. We then went to the Inquisition Museum where we learned all about the gruesome history of this place. We finished our visit by visiting the town and capping it off with a beer before heading back to Castelnaudary.
Our final two days were mostly spent driving back to Paris. The day before we got back, we visited the town of Limoges where we walked around the streets and visited the cathedrals. This town was quite a bit bigger than Béziers that we had visited on the way down. Overall, it was beautiful to see the French countryside and the really old stone buildings in all the different towns that we had passed both big and small. We passed a lot of wineries in southern France and even tasted some of the local wines. Maybe next time we travel in France, we'll head up north to the mountains.