Caves, castles, and aircraft

This year for the February holidays we took off to the small southern French city of Carcassonne. Carcassonne is famous for being the largest and best preserved medieval city in Europe. It’s double walled structure and interior fortified castle still stand. It is the inspiration for the board game, Carcassonne, and filming location for Robin Hood. It’s also a great place to get lost in time. Emily and Sam loved galloping their imaginary horses through cobbled alleys.

Working back along the timeline of human history, we explored the Roman impact on the area. In the city of Nîmes, is the best preserved roman arena. Though not as large the colliseum in Rome, it is very well interpreted. We could have stayed longer but we had something even bigger to see. Pont de Gard is the largest Roman aqueduct still standing. We walked across it and marvelled at the engineering. 

And even further back in time, we drove towards the Pyrenees mountains, to Niaux. Here, there is one of the few prehistoric cave painting sites, still open to the public. The paintings are said to be comparable to the famous Lascaux caves. 14,000 years old and still telling their stories. 

Then we jumped back to the modern engineering of humans, with a visit to the AirBus 380 assembly plant in Toulouse. Seeing how these massive planes are conceptualised, tested, and built was pretty incredible.

Marvellous Marseille

It’s winter. And winter in Europe, pretty much everywhere, is cold, grey, and rainy. The solution? A girls weekend! 

The weather wasn’t much better, but the change of scenery and good company was a welcome change.