Gérande | JBinnacle – A Travel Logbook

For my final day we went to visit the nearby town of Carcassonne, which is famous for having a medieval fortified citadel, the Cité de Carcassonne , which can be traced back 2,500 years, to the Gallo-Roman period. It’s been a Unesco Heritage Site since 1997.

We wandered around the citadel for a few hours, and we had lunch, the famous (so I was told, I had no idea at the moment) cassoulet, made with white beans, duck confit, sausages, pork and mutton, served in a cassole. I remember this as super heavy but I have this obsession to eat everything I’m served, so I finished it – maybe I shouldn’t have.

Placed we visited included the Château Comtal, the Counts’ Castle, dating from the 12th century…

… the walls…

… The former cathedral of Carcassone, the Basilica of Saints Nazarius and Celsus…

The Église Saint-Nazaire, the church of Saint Nazaire…

… the Porte Narbonnaise, one of the castle gates…

… and the Cimetière de la Cité, the graveyard.

After that, we headed back to the train station and back to Toulouse as the following day I was flying back home, and France said goodbye with a neat sunset.

In the morning we set off towards the north of France through the provinces of Brittany and Normandy. There were not that many cars on the road so that was good, because the car was a scale up from what we wanted, and I had to get used to driving a bigger car than I am used to. And I’m bloody short so using a higher car was… a challenge. After a couple of hours we had to take a break because my leg was cramping.

Eventually we got to Gérande, which is a Medieval fortified town dating from the Wars of Succession. We walked around for a while and had breakfast, and saw a lot of speciality shops, among them lots selling salt. Here’s the La porte Saint-Michel, the main gate.

But, why salt in the shops, you may ask? Because Gérande has been famous for its salt marshes since the 19th century. And of course we made a stop to visit the Salt Marshes of Gérande. Did I mention “of course”?

Our destination for the day was Le Mont-Saint-Michel, the mount of Saint Michael (Unesco World Heritage Site). It is a tidal island in the area of Normandy in France, at the mouth of the Coueson river. It features a medieval town and a Christian Abbey and a monastery. The main buildings tend to be Romanesque and Gothic, and the atmosphere is really cool – you might have noticed that I’m a bit of Gothic-style fan by now.

It was chilly and windy, and to be honest I found Mont-Saint-Michel to be slightly disappointing. The construction and exploitation of the tourism side, with building a parking lot and so on blew up the tidal system a couple of decades ago and the island is no longer such. They’re working now to try to restore everything back to how it was, but at the same time they are keeping a bridge, although that one should work for allowing the tides to move through. It was overcrowded, but we managed to have a good stroll.

After visiting Mont-Saint-Michel, we headed off to find our B&B at a small village about an hour away. I took a long, long, hot, hot shower and we ate some snacks for dinner.