September 14, 2015

We wanted to find one of the coolest castles in Europe to visit and this could definitely have been it!  The city of Carcassonne is over 2,000 years old and has tons of history.  It was an active city until about the mid 1600’s when it was gradually abandoned.  Luckily, in the 1800’s, an architect decided to study and rebuild it to the standards of how it would have looked during medieval times.  They did an amazing job and that is how Carcassonne is seen today.

Our luck getting here was a little better, but we still think we’re a little jinxed.  We made it to Carcassonne without much issue, but when we got to the town, we missed the last bus and had to take a taxi out to the campsite.  It was only a few km’s so it wasn’t too expensive.  The campsite was decent, but not much grass.  Unfortunately, it POURED down rain that night.  Thank goodness for our waterproof tent!  It was lightning and raining so hard that mud was splashing up all over the sides of the tent.  We managed to stay dry and the weather was fine from that point on.

We went into town the next morning to check out the castle and the village.  From the campsite, it was only about a 15 minute walk along a nice river.  The city looks amazing sitting on top of the hill!  This was the site that they used for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for the scenes that are supposed to be Nottingham Castle.

View of the entire city (castle)

The inside of the castle is restored as well as the outside, so it was cool to walk through everything.  We took the tour on the inside of the chateau where the people would have lived back in the day.  I think I would have been willing to live here!  🙂  There was a beautiful courtyard, neat rooms, lots of statues, and great views from every window as well as the city walls.

Inside of the courtyard

Town walls and towers

View from the town walls

View from the castle

View from the town wall

In one of the rooms, they discovered that the original walls had been covered over and they found the paint underneath.  In order to restore the room, they needed to carefully scrape off the wall covering, by hand, with a razor blade so that they wouldn’t damage the paint underneath…that’s a LOT of work!

1,000 year old paintings

The front of the castle looks just like you would imagine a medieval castle looking and the best part was that they had a restaurant right there where we ate lunch.  Probably one of the best views that I could imagine for lunch!  The food was awesome.  We had a traditional dish, cassoulet, which was really good…it is sort of like a bean soup, but with pork and duck.  I also got crème brulee…my favorite!!

Entrance to the castle

Carcossonne

Nice place for lunch!

After lunch, we walked though the shops and around the castle walls for a while.  There weren’t too many people there since the high season is over, so we had fun getting up on the walls and playing around.

Carcossonne

Hanging out on the city walls (just like in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)

Cathedral inside of the city

Carcossonne City

We finished the day walking back to the campsite and going to bed early to get up to leave for Spain in the morning!  We thought maybe our bad luck was over, but in the morning, when there should have been a 7:56 bus, it didn’t show up and we had to walk to the train station (about 4 km).  It wasn’t the end of the world, and we made it on time, but we are hoping that our luck will change back again once we get out of France!