Trip to France - Day 1

On the 2nd of September Lee and I set off to France for ten days in the sunshine with my mum, stepdad, and my godparents, Alison and Derek. They live in France full time now, and have for ten years, and I haven't spent much time with them in so long, so I arranged for us all to have a holiday. We booked the gite last October and have been looking forward to it ever since! We had it booked from the Saturday until the following Wednesday, but as it turned out Manchester only has flights to Carcassonne on Wednesdays and Fridays, so Lee and I flew out on the Friday and had a night in Carcassonne by ourselves. We arrived at the airport really early and had a coffee then had a wander round the duty free before getting KFC for lunch (love their vegan burger!) and then queuing for the plane. 

We had booked an Airbnb right on Place Carnot in the 'new' city. Carcassonne is world famous for having the 'old' walled city, which was built by the Cathars, but it has a newer city too, which is still pretty old and still very beautiful. Place Carnot is one of the main squares in the 'new' city, so we were happy to stay right on it. We arrived around 5pm, having got a taxi from the airport, and rested for a bit in the airconditioning, before setting out to get something to eat.

Now, vegetarian options still aren't great in France, which I already knew, especially in smaller places. Basically everywhere will have pizza, but I don't always want to have pizza. So I had told myself I could eat some fish if I wanted - I do very rarely eat salmon and always really enjoy it when I do, so I'm not going to beat myself up too much. We walked round the whole square looking at each restaurant and sure enough vegetarian options were pretty thin on the ground. So I had salmon pasta in L'Atelier. Lee had a pizza, and then I had Cafe Liegois and he had chocolate liegois. So very French and absolutely gorgeous!

We went back to the Airbnb and watched Netflix. We were both very tired so didn't want to do much else. My mum and stepdad were already in France, staying at Alison's until the next day, so we were nearly all ready to meet!

We did Drop and Go with the car in Manchester which was fine but meant a really long walk from the car park for me. But I did it!

It had been really foggy over the tops on the way there

Sitting in Costa

Our plane - nothing fancy but it didn't take too long and was basically fine

In the Airbnb the lift went right into our apartment - you had to put a code into the lift to take you to the right place. This cute mat met us directly out of the lift

The room/apartment. You couldn't really have cooked in it but it was fine

Out on the square

Looking down one of the side streets with these cute hanging balls overhead 

Lee in the restaurant

Me drinking an Aperol Spritz with the toilets in the background - I go the best places, me

Salmon pasta

Cafe liegois

And finally Lee and his dessert. Just after this it started raining really heavily and everyone ran for cover near us. There was a proper thunderstorm overhead during the night, it really scared me!