My nephew John was returning to London from his holiday in Spain so we arranged to meet for breakfast on his way through France. His route was taking him through the east so we drove for an hour an a half to a small town called Bizanet near Narbonne. When we arrived the only thing open was the Boulangerie so we bought up loads of croissants, pan au chocolate and baguettes and sat in the town square to catch up as street vendors set up for their market. It was really great seeing John and Phoebe and James again and they seemed to have had a fantastic holiday. An hour later they had to hit the road to carry through to Dijon, so we decided to explore Narbonne.
In terms if Cathar history, Narbonne is an interesting place because after the slaughter at neighbouring Beziers, the leaders at Narbonne surrender to the Crusaders immediately and the town was used as a seat of power for the Crusaders for the rest of their campaign. In fact, I read that Aummery became Bishop of Narbonne and excommunicated his old ally Simon de Montford shortly thereafter. In addition, Narbonne is nearly 3000 years old having been an important trading post in Gaul well before Christ. Unfortunately there was little evidence of any of this interesting history as we drove through, and while the Cathedral and archeological museum would have been well worth a look, the children are suffering badly from sight seeing fatigue, so we drove through.
Chris was particularly excited about being this close to the Mediterranean Sea so we drove further along until we struck Peyriac de Mer. This is a really beautiful little seaside town, around 2200 years old. The landscape and the architecture was quite different here – dry and rocky with grape vines growing in limestone soil next to the coast.
We had a lovely lunch and explored for a while before heading home.
On the way home we struck traffic!! We later learnt that this is the worst weekend of the year to be on the French roads because so many people go on holidays on this weekend. There were campervans everywhere. We decided to take a detour up a side road. Tarmac quickly gave way to dirt…..and dirt soon became a goat track. Still we persisted even as the road became so narrow that as we drove past a property the side mirrors were practically scraping the wall!
We continued as the track got rockier and steeper, somewhat confident that we would soon see civilisation because the GPS was indicating that the track eventually hit a main road. Finally our track ended at a farm house (with the GPS indicating that the road continued through the middle of the house). A very surprised woman who was tending her bee hives (obviously not a lot of people keep driving up this track until they end up at her house) indicated that we would have have to turn around and go back the way we came as “our car wouldn’t be able to cope with the rest of the track.” We did as she suggested and eventually ended up back on a sealed road and very grateful to be sitting behind an army of campervans travelling in second gear!
In the evening we went to Caroline’s house for drinks. She had some interesting guests staying with her who are wine experts from England. They actually own a winery in Dorset (I didn’t even know that England has wineries) and Steven has worked with Mike Smith from Smith and Shaw winery in South Australia for years as the wine consultant for Singapore airlines. We had a lovely couple of hours learning more about French wines and later Caroline showed us her art studio where she has some incredible sculptures.