Friday, May 29, 2015
Yesterday we went to Foix, two hours due south “ in the
foothills of the Pyrenees” the seeing of which is my third and final objective
for this stay after Carcassonne and the Chauvet cave recreation which we saw
last week. We counted up all our coins. There is a nice web site which figures
out the cost of tolls and the likely
cost of Gasoil between any two points in France – and beyond, as far as we
know. You need to have enough coins because there are no people available to
help you change paper money at any of the toll stops we’ve seen. The roads to Toulouse and beyond are plenty
fast but somehow more modest than our highways. There are trucks but fewer of
them and every 8-10 Km there is an Aire de someplace local, a rest stop with
facilities, picnic tables, a chance for kids to run around and older folks to
stretch, and sometimes a restaurant. I
think roads back home are King, where here a lot of them are just centuries old paths with a bit of
asphalt slapped on top. Somewhere along the way, we came out from behind an obscuring hill and for a second saw odd jagged clouds floating above the horizon. No!! Que Merveilleux!!! We were finally seeing the snowy peaks of the PYRENEES!! It was truly thrilling. Our picture doesn’t get it at all.
NEXT:
Across the wide plain and up into the big foothills we found
the town of Foix honest to God NESTLED into the little valleys. Sometime in 1000-1100 somebody built a chateau on the tippy top of the
pictured tall tall outcropping of limestone. (Take mountain streams surging through
layers of limestone for lots and lots of years and you get some fantastical
features. Apparently the cliffs under the chateau have caves that show signs of
prehistoric habitation. ) One picture is from a postcard because we were much
too close under the chateau to show what it looks like. The others are our pictures including the view
up from the restaurant where we had lunch. This
was a stronghold of the Cathars but it still fell to the northern
crusaders around 1209. It got traded
around for three centuries finally ending up as part of the wide area ruled by Henri of Navarre, a
Protestant and a minor relative of the French crown. For lack of other choices, he got chosen by the very Catholic Catherine
de Medici to marry her daughter and become King of France. All sorts of high ranking Protestant
Huguenots came to the wedding; the gates of the city were closed and they were
slaughtered on St. Bartholomew’s Day . Henri, now Henri IV of France ,
converted straightaway. Years later he
signed the treaty of Nimes giving religious freedom to protestants .
Back to the 21st century : After a lovely lunch
in the beautiful and gracious center of town, we tried to figure out the
byzantine parking payment system that involved many instructions, our number plate, various levels of free and paid time, and the machine which required exact change, and balked at our using
a credit card though it had the slot for it, naturally all in French. A tall fellow, with a
Midwestern accent, who lived in town , stepped
in to help. He was born in Foix, went to Canada when he was five, lived there
and in the US for the next 55 years, serving in our army. He was stationed in
NY, Georgia and Washington among other places. He retired 3-4 years ago and came
back to “this hick town”. We noticed
that after he got us squared away, he helped some other people so it wasn’t
just a language problem.
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