Day 17: Adéu Barcelona, bonjour Carcassone

Today we had two sad tasks ahead of us: fare-welling Barcelona, and fare-welling Shaz and Ken.  But no tears, we will meet again soon.  Maybe in Florence, and definitely in Paris!
After breakfast and goodbyes, we made our way to the airport using the Aerobus.  Very easy, cheap and quite comfortable.  At the airport we grabbed a coffee and waited around a bit as the appointment to pick up our car for the next part of our journey was a little way off still.
We were picked up by a minibus and taken to collect our car, a cute brand new Peugeot 208 Auto.  Um, wait, that’s a manual.  The guy asks if that’s OK.  I answer "yes, yes, no problem."
"My car at home is a manual.  But an auto is what I ordered."
Why would it be a problem? I have to drive a car on the wrong side of the road, with road signs I can’t even read, with all the controls being on the wrong side of the car, in a country where I don’t even know which way is north half the time; and now I have to think about changing gears with my right hand. Sure, no problems at all…

The car was supplied with only a waft of fuel, so the next challenge was finding a petrol station.  Well that was easy, but getting the fuel was another matter.  No matter which button I pressed, no fuel was coming out of that pump.  Even the nice guy next to me, with my limited Spanish (4 words) wasn’t able to help.  Inside, the attendant didn’t have a lot of English, and I think she decided it was easier to just turn on the fuel for me rather than explain what I believe now was a pay before fill up policy.
Glad that was sorted, now out onto the motorways.  Hmmm, easy enough. Now, how do these toll things work…
Ah, you have to choose the right booth to go through based on the symbols above.
Visa card doesn’t work, have to use cash. Lucky we have enough.
Ah, too easy.  Wait, this toll booth wants us to take a ticket.
Now this next booth wants the ticket.  Ah, it all starts to make sense, sweet.
Soon we had left Spain and were in France.

We continued through the mountains, where we could see in the distance castles many of the mountain peaks.
The road signs were now saying Carcassonne, and it wasn't long before we were parked waiting for our host to arrive and check us in. Our apartment was great, with only four flights of stairs and views from the windows across terraced houses to Cité de Carcassonne, or La Cité up on the hill.

Our view from out window

We walked down to the river and across the Pont Vieux and made our way up to the old medieval city.  It was fantastic, like truly being in an old medieval city, with walls surrounding the city and old stone buildings lining the cobbled streets.  It was quite late, but still too early for dinner; a lot of the shops were closing up, but there were still a lot of people walking around.  There even was a medieval singing and dancing troupe walking the streets!

We explored inside Basilique Saint-Nazaire which had the most beautiful stained glass rose and windows.

And yes, you guessed it, we lit a candle...

It was about 6:30, and we found a nice restaurant to try.  But struggling with language difficulties we were told by the restaurant staff that were all sitting around a table eating some amazing looking food, that they didn’t open till 7PM.  So we find a nice garden bar and I tried a Pastis 51.  Like!  That goes onto the Dan Murphy Shopping List.
Just after 7, with the restaurant now open and nearly full! we received our 1^st dish. I had ordered fish soup.  Now how hard can that be?  But it came all deconstructed.  How embarrassing.  Now I felt like a real tourist.  But I figured everything on the plate was meant to go into the soup, so in it all went, and I believe I did it right as it tasted pretty good.
Now I love duck, and I was in France, so main was to be duck confit.  It was OK.  I hadn’t had duck confit before, but I’m sure it should taste better than this.  And the crème caramel dessert was very average. 
So we need to find a better restaurant than La Table Ronde for our dinner tomorrow night.  The atmosphere however was really good, and a couple of Spanish guitarists set up and played for us as the sun was setting. Lovely!

Some more pics are right here.