Without a Clue Episode 2, Carcassonne and Nice

Carcassonne and Nice, Without a Clue Episode 2

Welcome, once again, to a delightful unplanned detour of two profoundly different cities. After getting off the short-but-sweet GR92 on the Spanish coast, the land of baguettes awaited. Originally, we had planned to simply catch a train from Portbou to Nice on the French Riviera, but we got off the trail too late in the day and the train ride was too long. So, we resolved to find a stopover point between the two for the night and continue on to Nice the next day. 

To that end, we pulled up our map of Southern France and promptly discovered we knew absolutely nothing about Southern France. There was only a tiny number of places we could even pronounce, and among them there was just one that we had heard of – Carcassonne. So hold onto your butt, dear reader, cause the only thing we know about Carcassonne we learned from a board game about gentrifying the French countryside. 

We rolled into Carcassonne in the evening by train. That night we did little but drink wine in public and walk to our campground, and even that simple plan took us past the castle. It just dominates the whole old town – it really is the old town – and seeing how huge it was from afar got us excited about getting up close. 

Just for posterity, Campground de la Cite is actually pretty alright. Nothing terribly exciting happened there, except we learned about cycling the French countryside from other campers, but that’s sometimes what you want from a place to stay. Uneventful, quiet. The weather stayed hot but with little rain, so it ended up being a great site for a few days.

In the morning, we headed over the best, and indeed only, attraction in town, mighty Castle Carcassonne. The two most important things to know are – 1. It’s a restored castle originally built in the 12th century, which makes it an 800 year old monument to French craziness. 2. Carcassonne is giant, it’s monolithic, it’s far beyond and any other fortress we have visited from that age (except for maybe Dubrovnik, which built its enormous walls in the 14th century).

Aside from already being elevated on a hill, the walls themselves are feet thick of heavy stone, capped with dozens of defensive towers. It’s got moats and keeps and castles inside of castles. It’s ripped straight from Lord of the Rings. The walls feel more appropriate for defending against dragon attacks or Vikings riding woolly mammoths than some silly English k-nights. 

 

Inside the main attractions are Chateau Comtal, Basilique Saint Nazaire, and the generally awesome feeling of being inside of medieval fortress. Technically, the walls pictured so far aren’t even considered the castle – they are the Carcassonne city walls. Chateau Comtal is the castle proper, complete with its own interior walls, drawbridge, and a moat. The French peasantry must have been fierce indeed to need all that protection from inside the city.

Next up, the Basilique. Aside from being a lovely church on its own, it also has some funny architecture. Standing there, the dividing line between the 12th century original gothic church and Renaissance style addition slapped on the nave is unusually obvious. There’s also some sweet stained glass. 

After all that we took the main wall-walk tour and did some more gawking at the scenery, which eventually led us back outside the walls. There we spent the afternoon postcarding and drinking yet more wine because it’s so cheap in France you’d be losing money not to.

The following day we actually took the day off for planning and rest. Jon went into town for allergy medicine and more wine, and I stayed at the campground doing nothing and scheming my hiking schemes for the Tour du Mont Blanc.

Then we were off to Nice the next morning, replacing the quiet French countryside with the number one neon party beach town on the French Riviera! It would have been difficult to find a more opposite place to go than Nice. 

Naturally, our Airbnb host was a circus performer instructor, so she was about as French as it’s possible to be without losing at Waterloo. She was kind enough to recommend a craft beer bar to us, and that’s where we spent our first evening. 

In the morning we set out to explore the city, which of course meant climbing something. We checked out the view above the Riviera and discovered that sucker is long. After that arduous climb, we sat mostly just our fat asses on the beach and splashed around some in the Mediterranean till the evening. 

Unfortunately, Jon and I are negligent photographers, and we got no pics of our evening spent cruising the Riviera and drinking (yet more) wine on the beach. Take my word for it, the lights of the city go on forever, and the ocean positively sparkles. The beach also makes the strangest noise in the waves – it’s a rocky beach made entirely of glossy smooth stones that look like river rocks – and the sound of thousands of river rocks clattering together in the waves is like a gentle landslide whooshing back and forward.

In hindsight, writing this now, I wonder if the absence of pictures and my romantic impression of that beach were influenced by the fact that a solid bottle of French wine costs like 5 euros at the 7-eleven. Guess we’ll never know!

The next day it was off to more viewpoints and another splendid beach at Marinières, a few miles East down the shore. By now I think the cheap wine was starting to really have a serious effect, cause we didn’t take any pictures of the beach we walked over to, or any of the weird painted-on building facades in Nice. Well, we did at least get some excellent views from the hilltop beside Fort du Mont Alban. The fort itself was closed though.

The next day we were already packing up and moving onto Turin, Italy. Don’t worry though, we will be back in France soon at Mt Blanc!