Carcassonne to Gourdon

22.11.11 Gourdon

I’m lying in bed, snuggled under the duvet, drinking a cup of tea and nibbling on a tostada biscuit (a bit like a milk arrowroot but not quite), outside is a pretty, but unfortunately red tinged sunrise, silhouetting a beautiful large mansion of the French style. All is silent, it is 8 o’clock in the morning. We are parked at an aire about 200 metres from the village centre, we have power, water, emptying facilities and stunning surroundings, we overlook turreted stone buildings in the village across a valley, and have a curtain of large deciduous trees, half naked now, but with remnants of  their golden cloaks, and a trail of gold and brown leaves at their feet. The only sounds we heard all night was the occasional very distant train, the hooting of owls, and in the evening, and then again now, the ringing of the church bell heralding a new hour.

We drove here, about 250 kms I think, from Carcassone yesterday. The drive over was easy, and the scenery magnificent. It was very cold and wet in Carcassone still, it took a while for the truck and us to warm up and dry out as I had got a little damp sorting out parking coupons and things, but as we headed west towards Toulouse the sky brightened until we were bathed in autumn sunlight. The sun being weaker and more golden adds to the colour of course, doesn’t wash out the scenery, so we were treated to magnificent views of grape vines with green, red, golden and brown mosaic coats, and reddish brown trees, different coloured soils on newly ploughed paddocks, from clay grey through beige, ochre, terracotta sometimes patchworked, and sometimes contrasting against a newly risen field of almost lime-green grass. It really is beautiful countryside.

We didn’t stop in Toulouse, but circumnavigated it on the perifique road and then headed out north up towards a small town called Montauban which we also skirted around, headed further north through a pretty little town called Cahors which I think bounders the area called the Dordogne. Our village is about 40 kms north of Cahors in the Dordogne, we stopped here for its aire, not for any other reason, it doesn’t get a mention in either of our books about France so obviously isn’t seen as a worthy tourist area, but it seems lovely to us, and I’ll put up a few photos I took last night when we went for a walk before dinner, as the sun was setting and you can judge for yourselves, whether it rates.