For some reason best known to a psychologist (probably), at the beginning of this trip I had a hankering for French gastronomic speciality called andouillette. Every time we went shopping, I scanned the shelves and boucheries [butchers] for this particular…

A few kilometres to the west of us, between Fanjeaux and Castelnaudary, is an area called the Lauragais, named after what I’d call little more than a village, Laurac. Laurac is overlooked from the south at a height of about…

We hear that the accursed Jet Stream, that high velocity, high altitude wind that circles the northern hemisphere is messing things up again by being misplaced. As it sweeps from west to east it also oscillates north and south, in…

Dateline: 11th June, 2012 Guillaume had to have his heating switched on! What’s going on? This is unprecedented; here we sit in the south of France in the middle of June and we’ve had to put the heating on. Staggering!…

Yesterday, after our enjoyable visit to the market at Revel, we stopped in at the Lac de Lenclas for our picnic lunch of aligot [a regional potato and cheese goop mixed with a rowing oar] and some chiffonade [paper-thin sliced…

Fortunately, although France is full of both supermarchés and hypermarchés, the French still love a proper, old-fashioned street market. Market day seems to be quite a social occasion with friends meeting and nattering whilst wandering around the vast array of…

Have you noticed that sometimes in life you may learn or bump into something new and, as soon as you have, that something seems to keep re-occurring for a while making you end up wondering how you ever missed it…

Beside the beginning of the narrow, local road which is the final approach to our Fanjeaux campsite, is an area which is used as a gravel storage area, presumably for road works and the like. Sometimes it is piled so…

[With humble apologies to Mussorgsky.] The main reason for our making this trip basically begin at Fanjeaux instead of the more normal end at Fanjeaux, was for Francine to investigate the mountain spring flowers in the Pyrenees. Mountains being what…

We knew we’d be meeting old friends, fellow fans of Fanjeaux, here and with a national celebration approaching, the temptation to arrange a 60th jubilee party for La Reine proved irresistible. Very graciously, we thought, Ma’am accepted our invitation to…