Our friends wouldn‘t arrive until later in the afternoon, so we decided to climb the castle of Puilaurens. From our stay in Alet-les-Bains the road winds through beautiful landscape, including the „Defiles de Pierre-Lys“, some beautiful gorges. Probably a nightmare if you‘re driving a campervan, but not a problem in a car.
Puilaurens has always been one of my favourite ruined Cathar castles. It‘s very peaceful up there, usually, and there‘s a lot to see still. It‘s not too hard to climb the hill, but when the sun burns down it‘s a different story. Luckily, it was overcast and we didn‘t hav to share the castle with many others.
The chateau offers beautiful vistas, and we enjoyed being back. Not just to this castle, but to this area in France in general.
Later I tried to find the path to a spot above Alet-les-Bains I‘m very fond of, but the paths were overgrown and no longer visible. Still, it was a bit of a workout and at least I got glimpses of the village from high above.
When we drove to Quillan, there were a lot of, say, interesting cars around. There was some sort of hill climb going on. That‘s about all I can tell you, because we later found out that we didn‘t take a single photo of one of the supercars or any car, really. Shows you how much into cars we are.
The dinner was excellent in terms of conversation – ranging from trashy temporary tattoos to a philosophical question about objective and subjective realities with about any other topic thrown in as well – and meh in terms of the food, which took ages to arrive and then was a bit underwhelming. Fortunately, food wasn‘t the most important thing.