To Toulouse For The Fun Of It; The Heights of Caunes-Minervois

July 4, 2013
To Toulouse For The Fun Of It; The Heights of Caunes-Minervois

          My sister is coming to visit on Tuesday, and is arriving at Blagnac airport in greater Toulouse, in the Midi-Pyrénées region.  It is her first trip to France, not counting the border crossing from Portbou, Spain to Cerbère, France we made with our parents in the summer of 1965.  To make it easier on her after a trans-Atlantic flight and a connection from Charles de Gaulle to Blagnac, I am picking her up, rather than have her continue by train to Carcassonne.  That means I want to make sure that my road trip Tuesday is smoother than the one I made two weeks ago, which lasted far too long, thanks to problems with the GPS.

          This time I don't use the GPS, but go directly onto the péage at the entrance near Carcassonne.  I have no problems getting to Blagnac.  After a pit stop for a sandwich, I turn around and get on the péage in the direction from where I came.

           However, I do not get off at the Carcassonne exit, thinking there is probably an exit closer to Caunes-Minervois a bit further on: wrong!  There is no exit until Lézignan-Corbières.  "Yes!"  Lezignan-Corbières, where my Clio #4 was towed two weeks ago, and where I had to drive the Seat Lion to drop it off, before picking up the Clio #4 with a new battery inside.  There is a website, Les Plus Beaux Villages de France --The Most Beautiful Villages in France, but none for the ugliest, Les Plus Moches Villages de France.  After two visits under duress, I nominate Lezignan-Corbières, in the "Towns" category.

           I make it back to Caunes-Minervois by late afternoon, driving via Homps on the Canal du Midi. Now that summer is in full swing, there are many river campers docked at Homps and all the cafés are open.  I drive to La Redorte, where I turn in the direction of Rieux and Peyriac, two villages over from Caunes-Minervois.  Rieux and Peyriac are my nominees for ugliest villages in France, with Rieux taking the prize on points, its narrow, lightless main road edging out Peyriac, which has at least taken the trouble to put in flower plantings and stylish lamps at each of the town.  What makes an agglomeration in a country as conscious of aesthetic values as France as indifferent as these three places --thereby hangs a tale.

          I change into my cycling shorts and go out for a ride to shake off the long drive's kinks, turning onto the road towards Carcassonne.  I reach the second exit for Caunes after riding for about twenty minutes on the flat road, passing field after field of vines.  I turn into the exit and come back into Caunes ultimately reaching the fountain in town that marks the top of the triangle formed by the two sides of the fields on the village's outskirts.

         With about forty-five more minutes of cycling possible before it is too dark to pedal easily, I take a road to the right of the fountain, and find myself standing at a fork in the road at which a niche stands, a large one with a figure of the Pietà made of Caunes marble carved in the middle.  The left fork is a road called Route des Carmes, Route of the Carmelites, undoubtedly a reference to a time when a Carmelite order of nuns lived in Caunes.

          I cycle up the Route, pushing myself to make it up the hill about a mile beyond.  I am rewarded for doing so by a spectacular view of the Black Mountains all around me.  I am the only person on the road, which lies between two fields of vines.

          I cycle back down the road to the fountain in the village where I started out.  With some time left, I take the second road on the left, which leads me to a development called Les Hauts du Roc.  Here the houses are large and detached, with about an acre of land around them.  They are part of a development that contemplates the building of fourteen houses, in two rows of seven, not very unlike residential developments built on a grid plan in the United States.  This is where the affluent Caunois live, far away from the cramped houses in the village foreigners find so quaint.

          The so-called "new cemetery" is in this area: I see the cypresses (found in every French cemetery) from afar, and am able to find a path to the cemetery entrance.  It looks like an old cemetery, though; built, if not in the nineteenth century, very early in the twentieth.  Which makes me think of the story I heard yesterday about the negligent disinterrals.  That story is still being told in the twenty-first century, but something tells me that its origins --and the reasons for its telling-- are much, much older than the cemetery in Les Hauts du Roc.