Rodez Monday

This post has a different format to the previous ones. The blogging software I use has given up. Reinstalling and installing the latest version doesn't work. Spent about 3 hours trying. Hope this one looks OK.

After a couple of nights broken by loud voices, we were ready for a good night’s sleep last night. The hotel room was very cool to start, but too cool, so we adjusted the airconditioning by a couple of degrees. Bad move. Much too warm during the night, the aircon was obviously touchy and a couple of degrees adjustment seemed to change it by a lot more. Headache material. Excellent breakfast outside at the Kyriad hotel.

We spent the morning exploring the old part of Cahors and enjoyed it very much. We wanted to visit tourist info and get some paracetamol for the headache from getting too hot during the night, so went into a car park, found that the first hour was free, but didn’t realise that we had a 10 min walk. After waiting for a while at tourist info, and not having parked where we really wanted to, Rick raced back to the car park, realising, just near the car park, that he didn’t think to get the ticket, from Gill, to get out of the car park. There was an attendant there, but he spoke no English and Rick’s  French was not quite enough to explain the situation. Fortunately there was a man at the other end of a button who spoke some English. When he understood what happened, he remotely printed a ticket and Rick was able to leave the car park. drove down and picked up Gill, who still can’t walk fast or for a long way, and found a better car park. No indication of parking charge. Some great little laneways, old buildings as you’d expect. Coffee in one of the smaller squares. We also stopped at a fascinating clock. Love things that move and do stuff. There was a supermarket next to the car park that advertised one hour free in this carpark if you bought something from the supermarket. Well, we always need wine, so a bottle of rose later, we were out of the car park, saving almost a whole 2 Euros.

Passed through the edge of a very attractive, very small village, Vers, and had to detour down the (main) street, not sure that there were other streets.

“She” recalculated our route after this detour and, right on queue, found a short cut back to the road she wanted us to be on.

Figeac was on the route, with this east-west route crossing the north-south route we travelled when we went to Montreal and Figeac was the crossing point. We accidently found a parking spot across the river from the old town, found that we could have half an hour free parking, and did a quick circuit of the other side of the old town to the side we visited over a week ago.

Conques was the next stop. We didn’t know much about this village, except it was reputed to be one of the “beautiful villages”. Wow! was it just that. Built on the side of a hill, it is obviously a very popular place to visit. So many cars, so much parking, but still hard to find a parking space. We found a pile of gravel dumped over 2 spaces and squeezed in sideways over the 2 spaces. As they say, a picture is worth a hundred words, so there must be thousands of words here.

We’re now settled in to our hotel in Rodez, finished eating, had a couple of wines and almost ready to flake out.