Carcassonne Day Three : Canal Walk

We felt that we had, in part at least, completed Carcassonne and so we thought we’d better do some walking to see a little more of the city. We opted to walk down the Canal du Midi which seems to have the suitable amount of low-level adventure to it. When it was constructed in the seventeenth century it was known as the Canal Royal en Languedoc, or Royal Canal, but the French Revolution saw an end to that arrangement and it took its current name. It’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it’s an impressive piece of construction.

The start of the walk didn’t look entirely decadent.

But the canal itself was beautiful and after Liam momentarily tried to walk us along the Amazon side of the canal, we switched to the rather more sedate paved side. We weren’t intending to clamber through too much shrubbery, not now I’m over 30 years old.

It soon became a peaceful walk, although as Liam pointed out, we were walking away from the airport and that was already an hour’s walk from the city centre. But, being brave, we continued with the mission. It’s not exactly a straight line mission as I like watching on YouTube, but I don’t claim this blog offers cutting edge adventure entertainment. Well, maybe one day.

The head navigator.

An engineering board. As Liam is a civil engineer I took particular interest in this to show my engagement.

Our head navigator successfully led us miles out of the area. I was very brave and didn’t panic once.

It started to rain, which I considered to be sub-optimal.

Some sort of pleasure boat drifting down the river.

And then we started the walk back.

The head photographer in action. It was a most pleasant way to spend a couple of hours and was at least some exercise, as I need more of that at the moment.

And to show the scale of the project, the canal a little further down.