Gigantor two-day update today. Are you excited? ARE YOU?! Well let’s rock!
Sunday – May 9th – Barcelona to Perpignan
Epic fail! The hotel provides no alarm clock, and they never bother to give us our wake-up call. As a result, we wake up at 11:50 with a noon deadline for checking out. A quick call to the front desk confirms that, yes, we can stick around for more than ten minutes. We shower and pack up rapidly, check out, and take a cab into the city, where our rental car is waiting. We pick it up – a shiny new Opel Corsa (which means “has no horsepower” in Spanish) and head out into the Barcelona streets. This experience will prove mildly horrifying, as the Barcelona populace apparently do not believe in road signs, or having any kind of logical system for which way their one-way roads will run. After a long, confusing drive, we end up at our first destination: the Park Güell near the north of the city.
Like nearly everything we saw the day before, the Park Güell was designed by Gaudí. Initially planned to be a sort of Utopian neighborhood for rich people, it never took off, probably because rich people were like, “ain’t no way I’m climbing those hills every day.” Anyway, the city eventually bought the land and turned it into a park, which allows people like us to visit. We wander for a while, enjoying the sunny day and taking pictures of Gaudí’s statues, architecture, and landscaping. Eventually, we’re tired of crowds and ready to be on the move, so we venture back out into the Barcelona traffic. This experience proves substantially less harrowing, as we are able to quickly find our way to the major highway, AP-7, which heads north along the coast toward France. For the next two hours or so, not counting the short time we spend at a sandwich shop just off the highway, we drive.
Driving is good. We’re averaging about 130 KPH, checking out the Spanish and, eventually, French scenery. As we cross the border, we also come up over the edge of the mountain foothills we’ve been steadily climbing, and are greeted with a long, slow descent into farmland, with the white-capped Pyrenees mountains in the distance. It’s very picturesque, and we enjoy snapping photos and checking out the sites until we arrive in Perpignan. With no hotel booked and no knowledge of the city, this proves to be a confusing event until we finally stop at a gas station and buy a map. We make our way to the city center and start looking for hotels, eventually settling on a semi-budget chain that provides the important stuff: bed, bathroom, and wifi. I’m excited to be in France, as I haven’t had a good duck gizzard salad in more than a year. We hit a local restaurant and my wishes are soon answered! The salad has not only duck gizzards, but duck foi gras, duck leg confit, and cured duck ham. Also lettuce and such. That is what I’m TALKING about! Full and content, we resolve to explore Perpignan further in the morning, and head back to the hotel to hit the internet and then catch some sleep.
Monday – May 10th – Perpignan to Carcassonne
Epic Fail TWO! Again with the not-getting our wake-up call. This is the last time on the trip that Charlotte and I will place our trust in the hotel to wake us up. Fortunately, she realizes something is amiss around 10 AM. I sleep through her shower, but she hauls me out of bed half an hour later. We get our stuff together and check out of the hotel (leaving everything in the car). Our first stop is a cafe, where we have coffee and croissants. We follow that up with a trip to Perpignan’s central cathedral, which is a pretty remarkable structure, especially on the inside. Sadly, photos aren’t allowed, so if you want to know what it looks like in there, you’ll have to go yourself!
After the cathedral, we hop into the car and head towards what is probably Perpignan’s most significant architectural attraction: the palace of the Kings of Majorca. It’s a more functional structure than many of the palaces/chateaus I’ve visited in the past; Perpignan lies at what was once the border of Aragon (a precursor of Spain), and the structure is more of a siege fortress than a gilded palace. It’s surrounded by thick stone and brick walls shaped like a pentagon, and additionally by a trench and another set of walls. The fortress is currently undergoing restoration, but most of it is still accessible, and Charlotte and I climb to the top of the highest tower for a nifty 360-degree panorama of Perpignan before exploring the rest. Once we’ve seen everything, we hop back in the car and head off on some back roads to the town of Tautavel, which is famouse for the discovery of the oldest known human skull in Europe (~450,000 BCE), and which has a Museum of Pre-History I want to visit.
Along the way to Tautavel, we stop at a small village hoping to find lunch. We’re investigating what appears to be the one open restaurant (eventually deciding against it), when Charlotte is called across the street by an old woman leaning out of her window. She proceeds to complain in heavily accented French about her broken car, her cleaning lady, and several other subjects. Charlotte does her best to a) understand the woman and b) ascertain whether anything is really wrong. When it becomes clear that there’s no emergency, we politely excuse ourselves and proceed to wander up the hill and through the near-deserted village, looking for a cafe. Finally one of the few local residents we’ve seen takes pity on us and explains that the entire village basically closes down during work hours since everyone works in Perpignan. We thank her, and head on to the next town, which fortunately has a bakery where we buy “lunch” … a hotdog wrapped in croissant dough for Charlotte, and a pain aux raisin for me.
We eventually find our way to Tautavel, which is not a particularly large village, and which is also mostly closed (Mondays, Charlotte explains to me, are treated like Sundays by many French businesses). Fortunately, the Museum of Pre-History is open. Unfortunately, the two ladies manning the desk were DEFINITELY hoping to close early, because they greet our arrival (along with a group of four French people) with scowls. Nonetheless, we head in and take a lengthy, pleasant journey through time, looking at relics, pictures, statues, movies, and vignettes depicting life in prehistoric France. We finally leave, and the two women rush in to close the doors and get the hell out of there. Charlotte and I jump back in the car, and begin a lengthy drive through very scenic wine country toward our next destination: Carcassonne.
Diversion! Charlotte sees a sign for Chateau Queribus, which is one of the castles she wanted to visit, so we decide to check it out. We end up on a long, winding road about a car-and-a-half wide that’s slowly ascending the side of a mountain. The drop is enough to ping my fear of heights considerably, and there’s no guard rail, so that’s pretty scary. Still, when we round the corner and see an amazing castle, perched atop the rocks at the top of the peak, it’s very worth it. We end up at a small parking lot, where we take pics of the castle and surrounding scenery, and discuss the pros and cons of living on the top of a mountain, surrounded by nothing. Eventually we head back down, and continue on our way.
We arrive in Carcassonne and rapidly find that the streets there are more confusing even than Barcelona. We know exactly where our hotel is, but it takes us about forty-five minutes to get from the bridge into town to the actual building we’re staying at. Note: the bridge is a two-minute walk from said building. We end up driving through a tiny, cramped alley that we’re not sure was meant for cars, and through a park, and past a cemetery, but we do eventually find our way in. The place: a house with several bedrooms and baths which are rented out by the owners, is comfortable, but we head rapidly back out to get some food before all the restaurants close. We hit the first cafe we find, which is populated by a group of five people who seem to know the owners, and two dogs, who spend most of the time hiding under the table and begging for Charlotte’s rabbit. Our hunger sated, we head back to the house and crash.
[Pictures from Day Four]
