We arrived in Carcassonne, France at 9:00 pm on August 11th. Our first impression of the place was it seemed like a nice little place. It felt good to be back in France again and it was certainly very quiet and peaceful compared to Barcelona.
Anyway, without any information about buses or taxis we decided to try and navigate the 3km hike through the new town and on up to the medieval fortified La Cité
High on the hilltop with stone walls and pointy towers the fortified city of Carcassonne looks like something out of a fairy tale. It also looks like the quintessential medieval castle.
This fascinating place has been inhabited since ancient times. It has been used as a defensive stronghold for over 2000 years. Still very much functioning, the interior is now a maze of cobbled stone lanes and courtyards, lined with shops, cafés, restaurants and luckily for us our HI Hostel.
It's the type of place you can spend hours just walking around thinking about days gone by and imagining if these walls could only talk.
We spent the next couple days wandering around these little lanes getting lost and finding ourselves over and over again within the walls of 2500 years of history.
We cooked our own supper at the hostel; however, we did treat ourselves to ham and cheese crêpes.
It was a lovely spot to eat, people watch and simply soak up the incredible old medieval atmosphere.
As you can tell we truly enjoyed our medieval times event here and it was well worth the steep hike to spend a couple days.
This particular fairy tale came to an end for us on the morning of August 13th. We said Au revoir to La Cité of Carcassonne and made the hike back down to modern day France.
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