lundi 13 août 2007
On Saturday, Alain and I went to visit one of his friends, Nicolas, and his girlfriend Sylvie. Nicolas and Alain were postdocs together in Virginia. Now they are living about three hours away in the southwest of France, near Narbonne. They just had a baby boy in July, so they invited us to come spend the weekend with them. The last time we saw them was in October, when they came to visit us here in Marseille, the week before we moved into our new apartment. We hadn't visited their home before and wanted to see the new baby.

(me holding Gabriel- probably the first baby I have held that didn't start screaming immediately)

As this week is a big vacation week (due to August 15th being the national holiday of Ascension) we were warned that Saturday would be a red day for traveling- ie tons of traffic on the autoroutes. We decided to brave it, leaving a little after 10. Yep, it was a heavy traffic day. Mostly due to the tollbooths, huge bottlenecks. France has great autoroutes, but a lot of them you have to pay to travel on- and it is isn't cheap. Traveling for about an hour on one cost us 7.50€. So the trip took us about an extra hour and a half than planned. We arrived around 2:30, and had a barbeque of sausages. We managed to put away two bottles of wine between the four of us, then went to visit a nearby port for the Canal du midi. You can rent boats and travel up and down the canal.


We walked up and down for a while, then stopped and had a drink. Got back, ate dinner, went to bed. The next morning Alain and I went for croissants, and were disappointed when the local boulangerie was sold out at 10 am. We consoled ourselves with pain au chocolat. Next, Nicolas, Alain, and I went to visit the windmills. The entire valley is ringed with windmills. After a late lunch (and one more bottle) we hit the road back, this time it took 3 hours as planned. A great weekend.

1 commentaires:

Starman a dit…

I took a picture of some of those windmills when I went to Carcassonne

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