{"id":4920,"date":"2016-03-12T16:41:14","date_gmt":"2016-03-12T16:41:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/?page_id=4920"},"modified":"2016-04-21T12:25:52","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T12:25:52","slug":"carcassonne-feb-mar-2016","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/?page_id=4920","title":{"rendered":"Carcassonne and Pyrenees Feb – Mar 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well life must go on and in this case holidays too.\u00a0 It was strange to cross the channel without a campervan but we managed ok.\u00a0 This time we went in our car – a BMW X5 and tried the Portsmouth to St Malo route.\u00a0 It would have been ideal to have gone from Plymouth to St Malo as this would be the shortest drive in total however for reasons best known to Britany Ferries they appear to only run that service when they see fit.\u00a0 In our case not when we wanted to travel.\u00a0 To be straight this was never meant to be a holiday as such as we were scheduled to “dog sit” with a little baby sitting thrown in while our family went skiing\u00a0at Ax-les-Thermes.\u00a0 The weather when we left Torbay was wet and windy and this continued throughout the whole 17 days.\"AD8A0117\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Portsmouth crossing is an overnight trip so we took a cabin in the hope of getting a reasonable nights sleep.\u00a0 We did better than expected and arrived in St Malo on schedule at 8:15 am however the disembarking took almost an hour and we couldn’t help but think Britany Ferries could learn a thing or two from the other ferry operators. We filled up with fuel at the local supermarket and immediately ran into a traffic jam that delayed us by around an hour.\u00a0 We finally got underway proper around 10 am and stopped for lunch around 1 pm.\u00a0 Unfortunately the rain persisted with a fair amount of spray\u00a0making driving at best stressful.\u00a0 We had thought it may be possible to make it to Carcassonne in one day and under normal circumstances that would be possible to arrive around teatime however what with a late start, poor weather and traffic we decided to call it a day around 5pm and booked into a Campenile Hotel and settled down to a beer and good meal in a village just east of Bordeaux.\u00a0 That gave us an easy run of around 250km in to Carcassonne arriving just after 11 am.<\/p>\n

It was great to see the family and the children change so much every time we see them.\u00a0 Our task was as mentioned earlier to walk the dogs daily with an added bonus of looking after Ingrid for a couple of days to give the rest of the family a chance to get settled in and sorted out with ski school, lift passes etc.\u00a0 We then joined them on the Tuesday for a couple of days and delivering Ingrid back so she could enjoy skiing which she did with much enthusiasm.\u00a0 The children loved skiing and all enjoyed sledging as well.\u00a0 It was Greta and Wilfrid’s third year so they were off with dad blasting down blue and red runs whenever possible.\u00a0 Dave had to “share his time” between teaching Felice and Ingrid and then fitting in a bit if serious skiing with Greta and Wilfrid.\u00a0 We tried to help out wherever we could.\u00a0 The weather was not good and alternated between too warm and too wet.\u00a0 On a positive note there was plenty of snow.<\/p>\n

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We returned to dog walking duties on Thursday afternoon and continued until the family arrived back on Saturday.\u00a0 The weather was pretty atrocious – really windy, cold (5 c )and wet with a wind chill factor making it feel more like minus 5.\u00a0 We didn’t make the effort to get out and about much as the rain put a damper on things.\u00a0 When the family returned we braved the weather and walked around the local lake but postponed a trip to Gruissan.\u00a0 As compensation Dave cooked his special moules frites – three kilos of fresh mussels in wine – that’s around a kilo for each of the mussel eaters – the others enjoyed salmon.<\/p>\n

We left Carcassonne on the Monday and headed back towards St Malo stopping the night at the village of Le Graves and the Hotel Croix Blanche.\u00a0 I must mention here that this was a superb find as we were made extremely welcome, had a lovely clean functional room and one of the best value for money meals we can remember.\u00a0 All made better by the excellent service of the proprietor.<\/p>\n

The intention was to spend a couple\"DSC04173\"<\/a> of days in St Malo before boarding the ferry back to Portsmouth and home.\u00a0 We had a good day re-visiting St Malo, had a Galette lunch at the restaurant on the city wall, had a\u00a0meal in the evening to round things off.<\/p>\n

We arrived the following morning at the ferry terminal only to be told that the ferry had been cancelled due to bad weather.\u00a0 In fact the Roscoff, St Malo and Le Havre ferries had been cancelled.\u00a0 We were faced with the choice of staying in St Malo another two days or driving to Caen to catch the remaining afternoon ferry to Portsmouth.\u00a0 We looked around at the driving rain, storm force winds, cold weather – a no brainer really so off we set to catch the Caen ferry.\u00a0 Following a rough crossing we docked at Portsmouth on time and finally arrived home around 11:30pm that night.\u00a0 The car performed well and apart from the weather we had a great time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well life must go on and in this case holidays too.\u00a0 It was strange to cross the channel without a campervan but we managed ok.\u00a0 This time we went in our car – a BMW X5 and tried the Portsmouth … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":4924,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4920","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4920"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4940,"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4920\/revisions\/4940"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vennwood.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}