Peeping in

Headed up to Carcassonne to pick up Mr B from the airport today. We decided to go early enough to go and visit 'La Cite' which is the medieval castle. It's very large, and filled with hotels, restaurants and shops now. And today, filled with a Languedoc tourist conference so the actual castle bit that the kids would have enjoyed was closed! You'd think they'd have the sense to run a tourist industry conference in some dull out of town conference centre that no tourist would be interested in... but no, why do that when you can close down one of France's UNESCO sites for two days.

The kids were a bit underwhelmed by the 'castle' which really doesn't look at all like a castle from the inside. They did like the views from the outside (for example this over-photoshopped one, this from today and this of one of the gates).

After too long in the castle and wandering around in the town below we had to race to the airport in a mad panic. There were, of course, no signposts for the airport, so we just had to head in roughly the right direction, looking out all the while for aeroplanes. All worked out well in the end.

Lovely evening in Castres with our friends with a sumptuous meal and much wine - and the advantage of an early start to proceedings was that we all got a relatively early night. Actually, that's nonsense. The ladies had a fairly early night. I left the guys saying "maybe we'll just have one quick whiskey before bed". Several hours later....