France - Dijon

Dijon was a very different place to Toulouse. OK it is smaller but its centre ville is quite different in feel. I am sure that Toulouse's buildings are not as old as they appear but Dijon has a lot of classical French stuff. It was also about 10C cooler.



There was still columbage (I am probably spelling that wrong), which is what I'd call Tudor



The main street had the flags of local duchies, etc, flying. Sorta odd given that I thought France got rid of all that a couple of hundred years ago. But the effect was great.




We had 24 hours in Dijon. It was very pleasant, though cooler than we had expected (but Toulouse was warmer than expected too). I think I preferred Toulouse, though I didn't have to deal with anything like getting us from A to B in the living sense, getting food, etc, etc. We just walked or rode or took PT to town. In Dijon we were on our own. It was still verra nice!

France - leaving Toulouse

(This post has pics this time around!)

After a very busy but happy few days in Toulouse, we headed off to Dijon. We had to get up before dawn (as did our host) and the train was well on its way by the time the sun got out of bed.



The train was very pleasant and we had the carriage almost to ourselves for the first hour or two of the journey. This is first class.



The train also went super fast between Montpellier and Lyon. Gosh that was fab! 300km/h. Just a bit faster than I've ever been except in a plane of course.

Finally, six hours later, we arrived in Dijon. Cheers!

France - cheers from Dijon

This morning we packed our bags and left Toulouse and our new good friends behind. I was sad to leave Toulouse but excited about seeing a new place!

We chose Dijon on advice of our Toulouse friends. Also we could get a train directly here but it did mean getting up at 6:30am on a Sunday morning after getting to bed after midnight.

My goodness, what a great choice!

I leave you with a few pics. On second thoughts, I won't cos we have low speed free wifi and it is baulking at the large pics. I can't upload them.

Cheers from Dijon!

Oooh la la! Toulouse!

On the 10th of September, we walked into town. Our plan was to hire Vélos but there were none left in the stands. So we walked.

Walking was good. Just as well. It is only a bit over 2km into the centre of town but we managed to walk more than 10km just wandering around looking at stuff (and today my feet are sore and Nathan's calves are complaining). We planned on getting velos back to here but umm, well it turns out that they don't like overseas credit cards (I can remember this being an issue in Paris not long after velibs were introduced there). But we survived, and at least it was not far to walk home!



We are fascinated by the narrow streets - they are not very wide at all. Cars park on one or the other or both or neither side (depending on the width), the narrow footpaths have green wrought iron barriers on them (presumably more to stop cars parking on the kerb and forcing peds to walk in the middle of the street even more than they do now), motorbikes, cars, bicycles and pedestrians are just all over the place. And the buildings are fascinating.



(I think that is the Canal du Brienne but I am not sure of the spelling or the French grammar but I know where to find it again.)



C'est fab! LOL



Today I hope to go back into town to find two yarn shops - we were only one road off them but one road is plenty far enough away! DH is not very willing to walk, and we need to do things like get stamps for postcards and fix up our I-94s, which the silly people in DFW airport did not take from us - they were running late getting us on the plane (that was fine, we were late too!) but did not do any passport stuff, unlike say LAX which wants your passport and takes the immigration card. We have to send off proof that we have left the US along with the card before we can get back into the States. Sigh. Oh and we need to book the next part of our train trip, which means deciding where we are going. 8-D

Ooh la la! Carcassonne!

Our host kindly drove us down to Carcassonne to look around the ancient walled town/fortress there. It was tres bon. (I seem to have lost the compose key I set up so I could do accents, etc. Ah, I've wrangled it back again.) C'est trés bon! Like really really bon. Trés fantastique!


(You really should click on all the photos in this post to see the bigger ones)

It was really interesting. I've never seen a walled town before - I've been to England but "only" saw ancient stone circles there, that sort of thing (which I loved seeing so don't get me wrong!). There are Roman parts, medieval parts and then the reconstructed parts. The Romans used small squared stones, the medieval parts are made of large, shaped stones and the reconstructed parts used very nicely squared off stones - they haven't had time to start dissolving in the rain.



I am not sure that I appreciated it as much as I could have. After all, I have absolutely nothing to compare it with. But it was totally fascinating.



We had a lovely afternoon walking around it, seeing it close up, being amazed by the tourist tat inside its walls - I guess that whilst the things sold may have changed, the shops inside have not changed all that much in the last hundred years or so that they have catered to tourist trade rather more than local rather. Cos oh yes, locals live there not just in the new town (ville basse) spread around the flanks of the hill.