Carcassonne View

Each time we visit Carcassonne, in the evening we admire, and take pictures of the floodlit city walls. On the main street through the town, below la Cité, a Mobil gas station closes early in the evening and provides an excellent view of the walled city on the hill. Maybe the best view is from the old bridge over the Aude River, between the la Cité and “new” Carcassonne. A picture is worth a thousand words, a visit is worth a thousand pictures, the video is priceless.

We have seen at least a 1,000 walled towns and cities in Europe, and if Carcassonne and Dubrovnik, (former) Yugoslavia aren’t the best two, they are at least two of the very best.

One day as we were walking through the gate of floodlit Carcassonne, I noticed the next song in the street musician’s songbook was the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” At the end of my solo, with flute accompaniment and thunderous applause from the tourists who must have come especially for this performance, my daughter tipped the flute player an extra ten francs, and reminded me the applause came after — because? — I had stopped singing.