Loire Valley to the South of France
With Allan and Carla
I'll always be an advocate for finding a tour guide that can give you inside knowledge and history of the place you're visiting-someone who can bring a place to life in a personal way that you can't get from a guidebook. Our local guide at Carcassonne didn't disappoint. He told stories about the 3km of walls, the 52 towers, and lessons on how to use the arrow slits to best kill your enemy. It was so entertaining we hardly noticed the crowds (more on that later). If you're not into a history lesson, just visiting for the views is more than enough. Why a guide part 2? After dinner, Virginie took us outside the walls and down the hill away from the fortress and timed it so when we turned around, the fortress was glowing from the sunset. It's the small details that make a guide a worthy investment.
Biggest disappointment...
I was knighted, but to this day Carla is still refusing to call me Lord...
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Wow! Sunrise...One of the absolute highlights of the trip. I'm a morning person, so not a problem for me. And no crowds; me, a woman from England and a couple of cats. I'll let the photos tell the story.
Travel Tip, stay overnight...I'd never heard of Carcassonne until it was one of the locations on The Amazing Race and apparently, everybody else in the world saw that episode and put in on their bucket-list as well. If you've heard it called an overcrowded tourist trap, you'd be getting a good description. But it's worth it, just remember that research is your best friend. It was wall to wall people at 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon in May, but by 8:00 it was empty. I wandered by myself for a couple of hours and hardly saw another person. Same thing the next morning. Even during the day, you can find some quiet spots if you wander along the walls and stay away from the shops.
