Pyrenees, Aude and Ariege then Montpellier again

22 juillet—Allauch
I now know why we have been getting some heavy hints on the lack of newsletter. It is almost a month since the last one, just as we were about to leave Pau.
Sunday saw us saying a regretful au revoir to Marie and Mickael as they repossessed their almost new apartment and presented us with a special local dessert so that we could take it with us to lunch with our friends from Broke in the Hunter Valley, Cheryl and Alan Stevns. Amazingly, I knew nothing about how special it was until Cheryl enlightened me. I think I will leave her description for you to read. Check it out on her blog. http://www.thefoodvine.com/. The article is called ‘Le Russe’.
Lascazères, where they live for a few months each year is only 40 minutes from Pau and was on our way to our next stop. We even had time for a long, leisurely and delicious lunch before continuing our journey. The evenings are long, so we had plenty of daylight left to eat our dinner on the terrace of L’Impasse du Temple, a lovely B&B run by an Aussie couple, in Léran, a small town south of Carcassonne, in the Aude region and near the Pyrenees.
We spent one whole day, and two nights in the Aude region, checking out Cathar castles, including Chateau Montsegur, and bastide towns.
Our quest for revisiting places we had been to in 1973 continued the next day en route to Montpellier, when we stopped off in Villefranche de Conflent. This is one of the star shaped fortified towns designed by Vauban, Louis IV’s military engineer. When we accidentally went through it in 1973 it was a remote mountain village and almost deserted. Today it is a bustling tourist destination, sympathetically restored but not too theme-park. We were in time for lunch which we had in a shady garden terrace restaurant. This was fine, until a threatening thunderstorm sent us all inside. Fortunately we were almost finished, just having our dessert and coffee.
That evening we were back in Montpellier as guests (this time) of Danielle and Francois Allier who went out of their way to make our 4 day stay very comfortable. By now the heat had returned so we spent a lot of time finding places to swim both at the beach (Le Grau du Roi) and in crystal clear mountain rivers..
Saturday we meandered through challenging mountain roads in the Cévennes area to join Laurent, Sabine, Pierre and Vincent Agostinetti at their holiday house in the Ardèche in preparation for the long planned trip down the Gorge de l’Ardeche by canoe on Sunday.
We can now say we have canoed the 30km along the length of the Ardeche from Vallon Pont d’Arc to Sauze at the other end of the Gorge and survived, in spite of 2 exciting capsizes. We should have made it unscathed if it hadn’t been a Sunday with the river like Pitt Street (ie hundreds of canoes) and it was hard to avoid already capsized boats in the more challenging rapids. No major damage, just lost sunglasses, Arthur’s hat and some pride! It gave some welcome relief from the 37C temperatures of the last few days to be saturated every so often. We even had a tail wind when the current slowed at the end.
to be continued ...