Game Theory

I've talked about Ticket to Ride, a board game about trains around Europe. But that's just the tip of it. We're big into family game time, especially on cold, rainy winter weekends, and we especially love games that tie in thematically with our lives here.

Memoire de France is a memory-match game with special places around France, including many Paris spots we know and love -- one of which we can see from our window, and exactly half of which we can walk to in five minutes or less:

 

To read about more great French- and European-themed games, check out the post at A Year in Fromage.

Four Cs of Languedoc

If Normandy and the Dordogne can both be defined by their four Cs, why not Languedoc, in Southern France? It's the land of Carcassonne, Catharism, Collioure, and Catalan.

Catalan:

Our next Cathar fortress -- Salses -- doesn't have the pizazz of Carcassonne, especially since we are forced to take an hour-long tour in a French so thickly accented with Catalan that not even the girls or I can understand it. Well, we're pretty sure it's French.

 

In architecture as well as language, there's a definite Spanish/Moorish flavor here. I love the arches and doors at the 11th century Abbey de Fontfroide, where the assassination of a monk was the catalyst for the crusade that wiped out the Cathars (they were Christian -- just not Catholic):

    

Cathar castles:

 

Suffering from castle-overload, we only have the heart to visit one real Cathar castle, but it's a doozy -- the nearly unpronounceable Peyrepertuse, which was built high in the Pyrénées Orientales starting in the 11th century. It's pretty easy to see why it was a good defensive spot. It's practically impenetrable even with a car and admission tickets. In order to get up to the top, there is sweating, and some whining, involved.

 

 

Collioure:

The girls' favorite part of the whole trip is at the end: two really magical days in the Mediterranean beach town of Collioure. Anthony works on all-important rock-skimming techniques with the girls, and Pippa decides it is of utmost importance to collect every possible piece of sea glass. She goes at this task with the dedication of an athlete training for the Olympics. She is a champion sea-glass-finder. It's a charming town and, frankly, we are glad for the respite from education and castles -- so much so that we never even manage to step in the 800-year old Château Royal here, though we walk by it dozens of times and certainly photograph it enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOME BONUS Cs: COLD & CLASSMATES:

In this unbelievably rainy and cold spring (throughout all of France), Collioure is a bright spot, quite literally. It's warm enough to hang out on the beach, but only a child could go further in the water than their ankles. I once got hypothermia (true, profound hypothermia) by scuba diving just a tiny bit further south from here in a Spanish small town with a big name -- Torroella de Montgrí i l'Estartit. And I'm not about to make that mistake twice. Don't believe what anybody says about the Mediterranean; if you want to swim, it's South Pacific all the way, baby. This sea is cold!

We are starting to feel like real Frenchies: We are about as far south as one can go and still be in France, over 800km from Paris, yet Gigi runs into a former Parisian classmate on the beach.

   

And now goodbye to the cultural Cs and the cold seas, and we're on our way back to the land of the four Ps: Paris, pollution, and pavement. Yes, I know that's only three.
 

O'er the Ramparts We Walked

Our family has been playing the board game Carcassonne for years. So, naturally, we want to go see the real place that inspired it. I know I once referred to the castles in la Dordogne as the castliest castles, but perhaps the title should go instead to the castle and fortress of Carcassonne.

 

 

  

If you ever make it to the middle of nowhere, France, where Carcassonne is inconveniently located, we highly, highly recommend arriving one afternoon and sleeping here. Most of the visitors are day trippers, so it's quite peaceful inside fortress walls after hours. Peaceful, magical, and just a little bit spooky, too. It's off season to boot, so we have the place almost to ourselves. Just us and our shadows.  

 

The morning is tranquil, too, before the next horde of tourists descends. It's nice that Carcassonne has the UNESCO World Heritage site classification, which allows them to illuminate it beautifully at night, but it does make it that much more difficult to find the quiet moments here.

 

 

At a chateau fort like this, it's all about the defenses, of course: arrow slits, for example. And my perennial favorite -- the murderholes, down which one could pour boiling sap (not oil, because that was too valuable to waste), or -- just for fun -- very large stone balls. I don't know why, but now whenever I visit a castle, I like to cry out "Murderhole!" in a sort of haunted ghost voice. Try it, sometime, if you want to cheer yourself up. I also learn about hoarders, which are not (in this case) people who keep old Chinese take-out menus for decades but rather the name for wooden walkways attached to the outside of the crenelated ramparts. They allow guards to look down and ensure that nobody undermines the castle. When the guide explains this to us, I get so excited I actually exclaim out loud that this explains the origins of the word "undermine"! My level of excitement is shared by exactly nobody, and Anthony shakes his head sadly, wondering how he could have married such a dork.

  

 

If a big stone ball dropped on your head doesn't do you in, perhaps you can simply arrange to fall off the completely guardrail-free walkways along the ramparts. If you do fall off, however, don't bother suing the French. It's your own stupidity, and your own responsibility; I guess liability was not a big issue when the castle was built about a thousand years ago -- on top of the already thousand-year old Gallo-Roman foundations (if you're counting, that means some of the walls we see were built around the year 300).

Dor-done

This year, when we leave the Dordogne, I feel like we've done everything we really want to do, though not actually everything, by a long shot. There are a surprising number of mills involved.

We get to eat at Au Vieux Moulin (The Old Mill), the restaurant in the unbearably cute converted mill in the almost unbearably cute town of Les Eyzies. We eat American hours, from the restaurant's opening at 7pm till around 9pm. As you can see from the photo, we  have the place to ourselves. Yes, there is foie gras.

 

 

We visit a mill where paper has been made since medieval times, and even get to make our own...

 

 

 

We take a day to go old-timey at Le Bournat, a more-or-less 1900s-themed park.

 

 

It's old-fashioned fun, all right. Gigi enjoys stacking the cans even more than knocking them down. We get to ride on a mechanical horse that goes around the track. And Anthony tells me this mirror makes me look, and I quote, "even shorter and squatter than usual."

  

 

We take a real horse cart ride (at my insistence) which becomes our family joke (at my expense) for the worst vacation activity ever, mostly because after waiting and waiting, we finally get on the overly-mellow cart ride just in time for the heavens to open up on us. So now I know: wet and bored is not my family's favorite state of being. Yes, Le Bournat also has a mill, which is still in operation, grinding flour to this day.

 

 

This year we manage to squeeze in the Jardins de Marqueyssac. It's not our favorite thing ever, but I can tell you it's a whole lot better than a rain-soaked, horse-drawn cart at an old-timey park.

  

 

And we knock off two more of the "Most Beautiful Villages of France," a list I have found to be unfailingly consistent. So many of these villages are in the Dordogne, there's no way to see them all. But this time we add Belvès with it's medieval market roof that used to hang a cage for prisoners. Nowadays there is a sample cage which, inexplicably, has a grubby Santa Claus doll in it. What is the world coming to when Santa himself is on the naughty list?

 

The photos don't do Belvès justice, because it's really quite magical. As is the medieval, hill-top village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, which is basically prounounced "San Seer La Poopie," and is therefore as much fun for Pippa to say as Les Eyzies (a.k.a "the penises").

  

Amazingly, we don't visit a single castle in the Dordogne this year, mostly because after the Loire, the girls have had their fill. But they better get ready, because the next stop on our trip is the most castle-y place of all...