Toulouse Excursion

Friday morning we set out on our long planned excursion from Paris to Toulouse, in the southwest of France. For as long as we’d been planning this trip to France we were planning on visiting Toulouse.

Why Toulouse? Tom’s college roommate, B, moved to Toulouse with British Aerospace 10 years ago. In 2005, we went to Toulouse for his wedding to “I” (Tom was the best man). Now 15 months later, they have a new baby E in their family, along with “I”’s 9 year old son R.

A digression to talk about weather… It rained a few hours one night while D was here and another evening once we were home. It has drizzled very slightly a few times. But, other than that, the weather in Paris has been phenomenal! Today (Oct 27th) it was not necessary to wear a jacket!

Back to Toulouse… Our only sustained rain on the trip was during the 7 hour drive south. In a way that was lucky because in the car it didn’t matter. And, when we got to Toulouse it had cleared. The weather did make us a little bit late, but in Toulouse they’re used to things being late. They’re building the new giant Airbus A380 here and it has been repeatedly delayed. Weather wise, this city is more like our Los Angeles than Paris. We saw palm trees in backyards, most days we wore short sleeve shirts, etc.

Since in this blog I’ve mostly been writing about things we’ve seen of a more general nature, I won’t take too much text to describe our visit. Simply put, we spent it with a good friend (B), developed a relationship with a new friend (his wife, “I”), and met their children.

While we were there we did take one excursion, to Gaillac, which is a wine region, and to the nearby hilltop town of Cordes-sur-Ciel. The photo of Maxine in the field of vines is from Gaillac, the photo of Tom with Cassie at lunch was in Cordes. The photo of the young boy with Cassie is their son R. It was a very nice trip, a long-planned excursion to mix a visit with friends into this larger trip to Paris and France.

By the way, when we got back to Paris MasterCard had a question for us. They didn’t understand how we could have charged $100+ to pay for gas within a 4 hour period – but we did! While driving is cheaper (with 2 people) than the train, it is still expensive.

No blog entry would be complete without at least a short comment on our travel companion – the 12 pound Sheltie we’ve brought along. Here is today’s. Cordes is a small but extremely ‘cute’ hill town. As we were walking through it we passed other visitors to the town, including a set of 20 teenage British girls on a lecture tour. What was funny was what happened as we passed them walking Cassie. On each occasion the lecturer had to stop talking and regain the girls’ attention since the majority were ignoring the talk in favor of cooing as they looked at Cassie (who was, as usual, oblivious to the attention).