Three Go Adventuring Again

With no chocolate :LOL:.
No choccy today!! Sun shining so feeling happier!! Are you both ok ? After your run ? It must clear your mind of all worries for a bit?!:sun:
 
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No choccy today!! Sun shining so feeling happier!! Are you both ok ? After your run ? It must clear your mind of all worries for a bit?!:sun:

Running or cycling for me is a good way of relaxing and not thinking for a while. Except that I try to improve my Spanish whilst there's nothing else to think about!!!
 
Running or cycling for me is a good way of relaxing and not thinking for a while. Except that I try to improve my Spanish whilst there's nothing else to think about!!!
Ola is my limit!!
 
It's OK it's pronounced ola!!!
Haha I'm good at the phonetics!! Do that when navigating so Rob knows which way to go!!
Off on school run see you later ! Did it rain for you?!
 
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We woke up yesterday to more rain and a forecast which didn't look as if it was going to stop soon so instead of the leisurely scenic drive I had planned we spent most of the day driving, finally ending up at Lagrasse, which is south east of Carcassonne.

Lagrasse is quite a touristy spot, with the usual narrow streets.

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And an old Abbey.

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Town walls with gates.

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An old bridge.

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A covered market.

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Are we getting jaded, is it time to go home? No, still lots to see!

We stayed in the municipal aire, which costs €6. It wasn't very attractive to look at but it was quiet until three French MHs pulled up alongside us and literally circled them, forming an inner space where they cooked and talked LOUDLY. But after a couple of glasses of red I mellowed and slept well. Notice how brown the grass is. They haven't had much rain here, until that is...

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... we arrived because the next day (this morning) it was cloudy with occasional showers! Do the clouds follow us? There must be regions of the world where there is drought we should try visiting.

Geographically, we are in the north east corner of the Corbières wine making region and there are a lot of small vineyards dotted around although the total production must be very small compared to places like Bordeaux as there simply isn't the same acreage of vineyards.

The region is also famous for the Cathars, a 12th to 14th Century religious sect which rebelled against the perceived corruption of the Catholic Church. As might be expected for such brutal times they came to a sticky and messy end though it took sometime and the odd crusade to finish them off as they had a habit of building castles in really remote spots.

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So today's castle hunt started with a drive south to visit the Chateaux Villerouge Termenes which was originally a Cathar Castle but unlike others it was not destroyed but was reused and stayed in private hands until the 1980s when the municipality took it over and restored it.

As castles go it is quite compact.

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It costs €6 to get in which we paid and you can also get a recorded guide on earphones. They had versions in English but didn't have one in Dog and as they had to my surprise let Charlie in free we decided not to take them so he didn't feel left out.

There are some very old frescoes on the walls in a few places. You might be able to see Barcelona on this map.

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They had dummies in places showing how life might have been.

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I'm not sure about this one. Did it really take us five or six centuries to work out the best place for the television was against a wall not on the floor?

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Charlie, under very close supervision behaved himself while inside the castle but as soon as we reached the battlements he had a sneaky wee when I wasn't looking.

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The way down from the tower was by way of a very narrow staircase which ran between the outer and inner walls of the tower, like a Scottish broch.

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The steps are only about 24" wide and I had to walk down sideways.

In the village there was a shop selling local produce or produce of the garrigue as they called it. The garrigue is the name for the dry limestone scrublands around here and elsewhere in southern France. The term now has culinary connotations!

TBC
 
Lovely descriptive blog and stunning photos with humour from Charlie !( peeing on antiquities !!! That's hilarious!!) I'm keeping a note as we do love a good castle and it's an area that we haven't fully explored yet perhaps next year!
Thankyou all three for taking the time!
 
After the restored castle of Villerouge Termenes we visited a couple of the more ruinous and remote ones which are more typical and give a better impression of what life must have been like back then, as you don't go to the trouble of building a castle on a remote pinnacle unless you are expecting trouble.

But first a general shot of the area with a Corbières vineyard in foreground and garrigue covered hills behind. We did buy three bottles of a local wine in the shop, which at €7.50 a bottle were certainly not the most expensive they had but after a bit tasting of what was on offer we think we chose a good one. I shall give a bottle to my cousin when we call in to see her just before we catch the ferry back - she recently fell off her horse and broke and bent various bits so is in need of cheering up.

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Our first castle was the Château de Quéribus, one of the last Cathar strongholds. The castle overlooks the pretty village of Cucugnan.

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The castle is built on a natural rock jutting up from the skyline.

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The road up to the car park which you can see at the bottom of the picture is very steep, first gear most of the way and coming down it was first gear and brakes!

From the car park it is a steep walk to the castle and I guessed a visit would take us two hours so we contented ourselves with just a few photographs. You can see folk on the battlements in this shot below.

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And though the sky was blue at this time dark clouds soon swept in and it was very cloudy with spots of rain when we came to the Château de Peyrepertuse which is built along a thin and lofty ridge above the village of Duilhac Peyrepertuse, where there is an aire although we didn't see any signs for it.

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A close-up.

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You can only see the castle in the pictures above as a few towers sticking up above the line of the ridge. They give no hint of the large structure behind and below them. It is not until you drive around the back of the castle do you see just how big it is.

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We have stopped tonight at the free aire in Espéreza, due south of Carcassonne and not a bad aire it is, CamperContact #20236, right beside the River Aude. Espéreza itself is nothing special but is attractive in parts.

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Tomorrow we will head south and probably overnight at an aire on the Spanish/French border before heading into Spain for our last couple of weeks.

Corbières has been a revelation and we must return to give the castles full justice by actually visiting them. The roads are very narrow and making progress along them is slow - but you never appreciate anything unless you have to work for it. :)
 
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Again another great posting. Where are you going in Spain?

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Again another great posting. Where are you going in Spain?
Not very far, I've an idea of working up along the Pyrenees then hop over into France to see my cousin just before we catch the ferry from Santander. I would like to see the Ordesa National Park again though by then it will be late July so probably very busy so we may give that a miss. I suspect instead we will spend some time around the coast in the far north east around Roses then head west. There's plenty of time to decide, we're not leaving until tomorrow!
 
Have you ever been to Aiguestortes? Some fantastic scenery there, but again will probably be busy.
 
Have you ever been to Aiguestortes? Some fantastic scenery there, but again will probably be busy.
Just been looking at that in my guidebook, it looks excellent although I'm not sure we will have time to penetrate very far into it. May just skip along the southern edge of it. Our route back into France will be via the Bielsa tunnel just east of Monte Perdido. There look to be lots of places we can stay. Just been given orders to find some sun for final panic tanning!
 
Just been looking at that in my guidebook, it looks excellent although I'm not sure we will have time to penetrate very far into it. May just skip along the southern edge of it. Our route back into France will be via the Bielsa tunnel just east of Monte Perdido. There look to be lots of places we can stay. Just been given orders to find some sun for final panic tanning!

Well just the decision to come to a Spain seems to be bringing us rain. Well at least black skies so far and Espuña has disappeared! Hope you get some sun!
 
I think I have thrown off my jinx and given it to @jumartoo because it hasn't rained today! :)

We spent last night at the aire in Espéraza by the River Aude and without any planning on our part we are now on another aire close to the river's source having followed the river all the way here. Our route took us up the fairly obscure Gorges de St Georges which starts at Axat and down which the Aude flows. The road is the D118 which is a yellow road in the Michelin atlas but I've been on wider white roads. There was also a disturbing amount of small and not so small rocks on the road, especially at the bottom end.

The road looks relatively straight in the atlas but this is deceiving. It is extremely twisty but the twists are so close together the scale of the atlas can't represent them, so the line of the road just shows with a few gentle ripples. I found it one of the more challenging roads of our trip. Great fun. :)

TBC (after supper) :)

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(one large plate of sausages and red wine later)*

In fact you might be able to tell from the menu choice we are in a place where warming food is needed. We have stopped, still in France at the free aire (CC #12061) above the ski resort of Les Angles at an altitude of about 1600m. It was warm in the sun this afternoon but it is getting chilly now the sun is setting and we have turned the heating on for the first time in many weeks.

The aire is a large car park just below the ski lifts.

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The car park you might just be able to see in the background of the picture above is this one.

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My skiing days, which were short lived after dislocating my shoulder, were a long time ago and I didn't at first recognise the tall pole-like things sticking up. They are artificial snow machines. A sort of Mr Whippy of the pistes.

We followed a marked trail towards the Lac d'Aude which we didn't reach as it was a 12km circular walk, or possibly just 12km to the lake. The single board at the start of the walk was unclear on this critical fact. At the start of the walk there is a sort of outdoor zoo with Pyrenean animals, including Mouflon, which we saw from the track where it skirts the zoo's perimeter and other large mammals including wolf and sadly a bear. I suspect the latter does not take kindly to captivity but the few remaining bears of the Pyrenees face extinction I believe so I guess it can at least be grateful for being alive. If of course it is a local bear and not as more likely one imported say from East Europe.

But we still enjoyed an hour and a half stroll on the track.

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There were some good views of distant mountains.

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The flowers were interesting. Not having a suitable book with me (again) this one remains a mystery.

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The Lac d'Aude as the name suggests is the source of the River Aude. We didn't reach it but we did walk on the track leading to it. Does that count?

Tomorrow we will cross over into Spain and find somewhere with more mountains to do some walking in.

*Thank you Mrs DBK, it was yummy. (I cooked the rice to go with it but that doesn't really count)
 
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Stunning photos again thank you! It always look very quiet where you are!
 
enjoying your posts very much DBK,however at the mention of a book,you have popped a bubble for me ,i thought you were some kind of human encyclopedia on all things nature :D

i have driven a car around that part of the world, it is very beautifull
 
enjoying your posts very much DBK,however at the mention of a book,you have popped a bubble for me ,i thought you were some kind of human encyclopedia on all things nature :D

i have driven a car around that part of the world, it is very beautifull
The irony is the original plan was to go to Croatia but that never happened. Unfortunately, the only flower book I have with me is of Mediterranean flowers and we haven't spent much time by the sea!

But Google works well, though I would have preferred a book - it is more satisfying to identify a plant the traditional way. The tall blue flower is Monks-hood or Wolfsbane. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconitum_napellus

Some very nasty poison can be derived from it and it has been well known for that purpose for a long time.

Shall I make the salad tomorrow...
 
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Not much to report tonight but we are now in Spain! To be precise here:

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Here being ACSI #2610, Camping El Bergueda which we reached by way of the Túnel del Cadí a 5km long tunnel which costs the very precise sum of €11.57 to traverse. I had it in my mind, not having looked at the map very well beforehand the tunnel would be the border, it isn't and we had crossed into Spain without knowing it about 10km earlier just before the town of Puigcerda. I guess we should have realised this when the lady in the toll booth at the entrance on the "French" side of the tunnel greeted us with a Hola! I might have also twigged when we had seen a group of French customs folk or "duoane" apparently stopping cars coming the other way apparently, to my eyes, in the middle of nowhere. It is extraordinary how borders have mostly vanished within Europe. Of course their presence on the road today may have been linked to the dreadful events in Nice but certainly there was no obvious border point with "Welcome to Spain" written on it.

It was only a short drive after the tunnel of under 15km to the campsite but most of that was steeply descending, the road must drop a good thousand metres and the temperature on the dashboard gauge soon read a reassuring figure in the low twenties. We had seen much lower temperatures further north and when I gave Charlie his first walk this morning at the aire by the ski lifts at Les Angles there was a touch of frost on the grass in the shade.

But we are now somewhere much warmer.

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The reception here gave us a map showing two or three local walks and we will do some exploring this weekend. Hopefully we shouldn't get too lost, given my experiences to date of campsite walking maps as we are finally in an area where my GPS has a map card showing the local area at 1:25K scale.

There is quite a lot to see here, Charlie met a Pyrenean Mountain Dog this afternoon which was guarding on its own a herd of goats. Coincidently the goatherd at that point came by in his car. He wasn't your typical Spanish goatherd as he had dreadlocks but he advised we needed to be careful because if the dog thought Charlie was a threat to the goats he would get chomped. Even Charlie understood enough of what was said to be on his very best behaviour at that point. You don't mess with a Pyrenean Mountain Dog. :)

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Hi dbk for the amount of time you been away van still looks very clean have you been washing it or is that colinite 476s keeping it clean love the blog happy travels :LOL:(y)
 
Hi dbk for the amount of time you been away van still looks very clean have you been washing it or is that colinite 476s keeping it clean love the blog happy travels :LOL:(y)
Good point, it's been washed once. We found a campsite in Italy which had a free vehicle wash. Which was just a hosepipe really but they didn't mind you washing your MH. I brought my long handled brush with me and used that to get all the dust off, Mrs DBK on hosepipe and me on brush. One of us got very wet! But we had a day of heavy rain earlier this week which got rid of more dust and the shine really must be down to the Colinite. It's been done by me at least twice, might be three times. :)
 
Today was going to be a shortish walk but the Curse of the Campsite Map struck again and it turned out to be a slightly longer walk than envisaged. :)

A path from the back gate of the campsite takes you after about ten minutes to a road bridge over a canyon. The shot below taken from the road bridge looking up the canyon shows the path we were going to take, conveniently fitted with a concrete wall complete with graffiti to begin with and the path then turns left and crosses the concrete footbridge you can see with iron railings.

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Thereafter, no concrete or railings are involved on the route. :)

Crossing the bridge, this is the view down towards the road bridge.

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The path climbs up for a short while and then remains more or less level for the next six kilometres or so. This is the view looking back once we had climbed to the top.

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What you can see is a long ridge above the road stretching into the distance. In the foreground the ground drops into the canyon we had just climbed above. The same ridge then continues and along the top of this is the path we were to take.

This shot taken much later as we walked back along the road below the ridge shows it more clearly. The path we had taken ran along the top of the cliff.

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We could soon look down onto the campsite.

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The rocks in front are the edge of the cliff. I didn't go too close. :)

Here is the view from later on, looking the way we were walking.

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If you follow the line of the edge from the bottom of this picture below to where it vanishes then look left you might see a thin brown line. This is the path and for most of the distance we walked it was this far from the edge though there were a few places it was a bit closer. :)

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Eventually we picked up a track at a remote farm along which we could descend into the valley at a point where there was a break in the ridge.

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In the valley there were a few small streams which Charlie made good use of.

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I took my GPS with me on this walk as I have the map card for this part of Spain and it was a good job I did otherwise we would have probably had to backtrack all our steps. This was because the campsite map showed a 10km route and an option to reduce this to 5km but we found both options impossible. The first option was barred off with rope and plastic and the 10km route seemed to go right off the edge of the cliff! We had followed the white and yellow footpath marks, which were clearly visible for most of the walk but towards the end they became very feint and hard to see. Fortunately, the GPS showed me if we carried on for another kilometer or so we would find the track at the farm house, which is what we did. This was off the region shown on the campsite map so without the GPS to show there was a track we would have had to go back as the break in the ridge was not visible at that point and the ridge itself continues for much further.

Here is the route using a Google terrain map.

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The red marker is the campsite and we travelled counter-clockwise. If you look very closely you might even be able to see our abortive forays off the cliff. :) 11.9km, it took us exactly fours hours and I was very proud of Mrs DBK.  :):):) Charlie did well too.
 
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Just bookmarked the campsite in the ACSI book. Always like info about walks from campsites.

Again fantastic photos. Good job Charlie is brown water coloured already!

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