After school last Friday we hopped in the car and drove south, on our way to the département of the Aude, country of the Cathars. That night we stayed in our first chambre d'hôte, and it really did seem like being a guest of a French friend. Almost. The house was grand in a cozy kind of way, the propriètaire was gracious and forgiving (there was an incident with a broken plastic wheelbarrow that I'll sweep under the rug here), the dining room lovely. Just the four of us with many candles, fresh lilacs, and old silver. To start we had a salad of chopped lettuce, grapefruit, and salmon that I'll have to recreate. Then chicken with a creamy sauce and mushrooms -- and how does the skin stay so crispy? -- along with cauliflower in cream sauce, zucchini, roasted potatoes, tart tatin.
Two things about highway driving in France: the food is really good, and there are plenty of places to pull over and picnic with playgrounds, places that are beautifully maintained where you can feed ducks or look at roses or read a book in peace. You don't have the feeling that if you take your eyes off your child for one second, they will be stuffed into someone's trunk. Highway traveling is, well, civilized.
It's hard to say whether it was simply the cold wind, the sciatica, and Julian's abominable mood, but Carcassonne was something of a disappointment. It's mostly rebuilt, and while it doesn't look Disneyesque or anything like that, still, you don't have the feeling while wandering around that you have dropped back 800 years and that a knight on horseback may come galloping around the next corner. It's very impressive to see from the highway, a walled city on a hill, but when you're actually in it, you can't forget that it's a recreation. I did have an excellent lunch of moules frites though, with a bottle of cider.
Carcassonne is another addition to the list of places to go back to, in better moods and when the children are older. I was dying to go to the Museum of the Inquisition but had to keep Nellie from knowing such a thing even existed. I explained a bit of the history of the Cathars in the most antiseptic way, since she gets very upset at the idea of violence -- Simon de Montfort was...a mean man. Chris and I muttered about the similarities to our current President, crusader and chief inquisitionist. Another mean man. It turns out that the way to get that back-in-the-Middle-Ages feeling is simply to contemplate Bush, Abu-Ghraib, and the Patriot Act. Same behavior, different costumes.
