Almost Carcassonne

For those who read this with a view to making sure we are still alive and haven't driven over a cliff, apologies for the silence. While I'm in an apologising mood, sorry about the lack of pictures so far, I have finally copied most of them onto my computer and will go back and add them to the blog soon! We are very much alive and back in St Remy and the Euro trip has come to a slightly premature end.

A few days after Barcelona, we set off from Conat (shown in the picture is the view from the house window of the whole town) towards Carcassonne, where a university friend of Eli's, Steve was heading to visit his mom for two nights from Hong Kong. All was going brilliantly until, with an hour to go 'til Steve's mom's place, the Landy popped out of gear and much whirring and grinding ensued. We pulled over onto a conveniently placed gravel patch and thus our days in the Landy were unceremoniously over. As good as Eli is at fixing these things, this thing was a bit too serious (we think), and something had gone wrong in the gearbox (possibly) or in the clutch (conceivably), and was not something Eli thought was easily or affordably remedied. So, we had the darling car towed a few km's back to a garage we had filled up at 10 minutes before the breakdown by the mildly amused garage owner (who had been chatting to Eli about the Landy while we filled up), and asked Steve's mom if she wouldn't mind terribly coming to get us. This she kindly did, along with her boyfriend, the less-than-amused town butcher who had to be up for work in 5 hours (it was already 11pm). So we had made it to Carcassonne (well to Puicheric close by), albeit sans Landy.

We had a great weekend though with Steve, Paula his mom, Modeste the butcher and Tiffany the dog, who with three walks a day is probably the luckiest mutt in France. We spent Saturday night at the Puicheric fete, which was a grand affair for such a tiny village, with a pretty impressive cover band and full-on carnival on the go. On Sunday we tagged along to a lunch in a nearby village with three British couples who live in the area, and who were all very entertaining with the hosts having owned a restaurant in LA, which was frequented by the rich and famous, as evidenced by birthday notes from Leonard Cohen and relaxed impromptu photo's of Mick Jagger and others hanging on the walls. On Monday Steve had to leave for a wedding in England which he sadly didn't get to as there was a family emergency in Hong Kong and Steve and Paula both had to fly over as soon as they could. We stayed on in the house with Modeste for a few days and walked Tiffany and organised to get the Landy towed back up north and eventually got on the train headed for Pas de Calais.

We didn't quite end the holiday there, as we drove 7 hours back down to the bottom of Normandy a few days after arriving home for 3 days on a little island called Noirmoutier with some of Eli's Parisian friends, as well as Dave from England who had been on a parallel adventure to ours, but who had been working on farms instead of touring the motorways. The weather wasn't amazing and so we had one good beachy day and two wet indoor days playing UNO, then headed home again via Paris for one night, where we had to go to apply for our visas to India for the end of October.

So, there are still exciting times ahead...about a week to go before Eli, his brother Henry, Henry's friend Gaultier and I move into a brand new house in Tortefontaine, a village about 10km from where we are now. Only 2 months later we head off for brand new travels in India!!! Watch this space...