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Day 10 – Carcassonne to Poitiers...

Welcome to Day 10’s update!

Today saw us having another lie-in. I know I know, wasting the day away…not cool…sorry… but it was a late night after all! This is more your fault that ours, it has to be said! But we only do it out of love for you guys!

We left our Hotel Ibis in Carcassonne by around 11.45am, having been invited to stay another night by the hotel staff (I think thats what they said – the phone rang, I picked it up, she muttered something in French and I declined…I think it was French for “be gone in the next half an hour or else”, but I honestly can’t be sure)

Our first destination of the day was the Old city of Carcassonne, where we had a jolly good look around (sorry, slipping back into Blyton mode there!) the old walled city, and took far to many pictures of castle turrets and old crumbling walls… of which we’ve been good enough to provide you a brief glimpse of:

Having stopped for coffee, breakfast and lunch (all rolled into the one meal), we then met a few of the locals – a little in-bred for my liking….

…and even bumped into this wooden fella…

…and this poor chap, who had obviously outstayed his welcome there somewhat (Chip, there’s a clue opportunity there if ever I saw one!)

At around 1.45pm, we decided it was time to hit the road and cover some serious miles, seeing as we were quite some way away from where we’ll need to be to get our boat back from St Malo on Thursday 13th

So without further ado, we plotted a route… (well, Mike plotted, I took pictures!)

…and gave it plenty of this…

On the way, as is customary at this time of year (any time of year I guess?) we maimed and killed plenty of these…

…and these…

(No animals were hurt in the making of this website. Much. Kind of. Ok, moving on..)

And made our way here…

But unfortunately, as we didn’t arrive until 5.30pm, it was too late to visit the caves which Mike and Hazel had highly recommended to us…

…so we decided that short of breaking and entering into the caves, which I don’t believe is the easiest task in the world unless armed with explosives (which had already been confiscated off us by the Customs officers as we were leaving Andorra), we may as well continue heading north, so expert navigator aka Mike Nolan plotted us a route and phoned up in advance to book us into our stop for the evening…

On the way we passed this poor unfortunate fella, who obviously hadn’t shown too much respect for the speed limits (tsk tsk…wouldn’t catch us doing that…well not that we’ve been able to get a decent pic of yet at any rate!)

…but we arrived safely at our night’s accommodation, over looking Futuroscope, in Poiteiers, checked in, and soon settled down for a pleasant evening meal, followed by a little too much Pression, and then staggerered..ummm, I mean took the lift upstairs to the first floor to begin the days updates for you!

You’d think that seeing as we were near Futuroscope, they might have super-dooper high speed internet access here, but after asking at reception if they had any access, we were none to impressed in her answer.. which basically translated was “yes, if you have a pc, plug it into the phone line and dial 0 for an outside line”

Hey–ho! We dialled up just before and managed to connect to Just Connect (a Jersey ISP) at 50.6k! That’s more than most people in Jersey get, so I guess we shouldn’t complain.

For those interested (assuming anyone is still reading our daily ramblings!), to date we have covered 1835 miles, of which we did 378 today, and 866 on the first 4 days.

Well, I think that’s all there is to say about today – tomorrow we may visit Futuroscope, depending on what time we manage to surface, in which case we’ll take plenty of pictures to keep you all amused. But either way, we’ll be continuing our journey North towards St Malo….

Until the next one, night all!

Garry and Mike

P.S. Managed to connect at 52k this time! Cya!