Tag: Americans in Carcassonne

Travel in France & beyond

Cork in 1 day

When Queen Elizabeth II went to Cork on her first state visit to the Republic of Ireland, guess where she wanted to go? To the English Market, of course, that’s been in operation since 1788. I couldn’t find out if she got a coffee and some chocolates as we did, but I’m certain she enjoyed seeing all of the breads, fruits, vegetables, and seafood temptingly on display. This city, the second largest in the country and with ferry connections to France, was going to be our first stop as well when we were planning this trip before Covid arrived but then things changed, as much has in the last two years. We ended up using Dublin as our port of entry and departure (next week’s post) yet we still wanted to spend at least a day here in this culinary capital of the Emerald Isle.

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Travel in France & beyond

Christmas in Killarney

No, it’s not yet the 25th of December but that song from the 1950s inspired today’s blog post title and a return visit to a welcoming town in southern Ireland. We had been there several years ago with our London friends, Jan and Bob, and we enjoyed that visit so much, we wanted to return. Since both of us are railroad buffs, we took the train from Galway, with a change in Dublin, to arrive in Killarney just before afternoon tea was served at the Great Southern Hotel (lobby photo here on the left). Built in 1854 the hotel name is from its location beside the railway station that was once owned by the Great Southern Railway when they operated all of the trains throughout the Republic. In keeping with the traditions of other grand station hotels we’ve enjoyed, they too have maintained the elegance from the “Golden Age of Travel”.

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Travel in France & beyond

Sleeping in a castle

Before moving to France we had made a lot of vacation trips here, sometimes with two other couples and twice with them we had rented a castle for a week. Upon arrival at these ancient buildings we were all like little kids suddenly set loose in an amusement park running around to discover the towers, dungeons, banqueting halls, and multiple bedrooms. On a tour of western Ireland with this same group we found a 4-bedroom tower castle (photo to the left) in County Clare near Doolin. That was such a fun experience that on this visit to the same area we wanted to see if there was something similar. By chance we had seen a BBC program called “Amazing Hotels—Life Beyond the Lobby” where the two hosts take on different jobs around the hotels to give the viewers a behind-the-scenes look at these beautiful properties. Once we saw the episode that featured Ashford Castle, about an hour north of Galway, we knew where we would be going.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

On a slow boat to Ireland

We can fly directly from Carcassonne to Dublin in about 2 ½ hours or we can take the train from here to the port of Cherbourg, stay overnight, and board the ferry the next afternoon that gets to the Emerald Isle the following morning. Based on the title of today’s blog post you can guess that we chose the 2-days-of-travel version, plus a bonus stopover in Paris. Choosing this option let us lower our carbon footprint—train/ferry average 0.1 pounds of CO2 per mile vs. 0.8 pounds per mile for planes—while giving us lots of comfort. (There’s a footprint calculator link below.) Our Senior Rail Card gives us a discount on French trains and the ferry we chose was more like a cruise liner with bars, restaurants, shops, two movie theaters, and spacious balcony suites. We were in no particular hurry to get to our destination, although even more luxury awaited at Ashford Castle Hotel, so we took what for us was the easy way.

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Life in France

Operator, give me long distance

The job I had when we lived in Chicago and LA was as a telephone reservation agent for a travel company. People would call looking for schedule information and to buy tickets so it was fulfilling since back then those details weren’t readily available to the general public. I loved the work but because it meant non-stop talking from 9 AM to 5 PM, at home the last thing I wanted to do was to use the phone. Consequently Bill got to deal with, as Hyacinth Bucket would say, the “white Slimline telephone with last number redial”, a task that he continues even today. That also means figuring out who has the best offer when your phone contract expires and how to start all over again when you move to another country.

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Dealing with government, Life in France

The patient patient

When we were investigating making a permanent move to France we read a lot about the experiences of others and two themes emerged. Everyone seemed to agree that the French love their paperwork. We’d had an inkling of that when we saw that to apply for our initial 1-year visa we would need to supply at least a dozen different documents (that list is here) to prove that we would be able to financially support ourselves during the validity of the visa. That process, with the paperwork, was repeated here as well each time we went in to renew our visa/residence card. It still makes me laugh to remember apologizing to our bank counselor for not speaking very good French when we opened our bank account. She looked at the pile of documents we had brought in for that application process and said with a grin while pointing to the stack, “Au contraire, you speak very good French!” We had our own experience recently at the hospital regarding that second theme: patience.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Secret coastal France

While I generally look only at a few of our local or national newspapers, Bill has a more rounded approach that incorporates sources outside of France, including the US. He spotted an article  by Terry Ward in the travel section of CNN that he knew I would want to see. The title was “The secret stretch of coastal France that’s nicer than Nice” so naturally I wanted to find out where that was. It didn’t take more than two sentences to see the mention of our region, Occitanie, and then our departement, Aude, to know that the author was talking about Carcassonne and our coastal neighbors Narbonne and Gruissan. Now to find out why it’s a secret.

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