After four days in the area around Cousin Marion’s home in the foothills of the Pyrénées Mountains – officially the Midi-Pyrénées area –  we drove to Bordeaux to catch the train to Paris. After the rural towns where we have spent the last several days, Bordeaux just seems big and dirty. We did have a terrific dinner in a small restaurant that was much more modern than the restaurants where we have been eating. The next morning, we caught a quick breakfast and then dropped the car off near the railroad station – Gare de Bordeaux-Saint-Jean – just as it started to rain. As an aside, dropping a car off at the rental agency, near a railroad station in a strange city, in a rainstorm, is a major ordeal. End aside. We ended the day in Paris – the first time I have ever been there, although I did go through Paris on the Orient Express many years ago – at Cousin Claude’s home, where we watched Hamilton qualify on the pole in a rainstorm, at the Hungaroring in Budapest (on Michele’s laptop which was playing the recording on our VCR at home!). 

We are with Cousin Marion near a small village in Gascony. It is like a movie set. We have very limited access to the net so my posts will be very lean for a couple of days.  

Toulouse was a pleasant surprise. A very short surprise. We only had time to walk from the cathedral to the main square before we left for Cousin Marion’s for lunch. The cathedral dates back to 844 and houses relics dating back to 250. It all made me slightly giddy – not quite the right word, but it took my breath away – feeling like I was looking at the very beginnings of Christianity.   

Back in Lyon, we decided to walk to the train station to get our rental car, stopping at the new Paul Bocuse memorial food palace for lunch. The lunch was terrific! Because of a problem with the Rental Car, we didn’t leave Lyon until about five. Then it was south on the Toll Road and then west, running alongside the Mediterranean Sea for a while, past the walled city of Carcassonne in the twilight, to Toulouse where we stopped because of darkness.   

We are in Lyon, after taking the TGV from Strasbourg, after driving from Schifferstadt. We will rent a car here and drive southwest to Cousin Marion’s home near Auch, 50 miles or so, west of Toulouse. The French countryside was beautiful, sliding past at 150kph and Lyon deserves much more than an overnight stop.