May 30 Albi

Roger conceptually knows where he wants to go but not geographically. You can’t exactly tell the Garmin “show us the way to the old city in Albi, those old streets I saw on Panoramio”. But using the iPad’s Safari and Maps, we manage to get there.

The old town of Albi, which they call the Episcopal City, is spectacular. The Sainte-Cécile Cathedral is the largest brick cathedral in the world. (BlogPress decided not to follow the format of my landscape photos and I wonder how to change them – for the time being, I let it stand.)


















Byt then, old houses can also be ugly and poor.





That bridge is not only still in use, it's actually used by trains. A second bridge, called Pont-Vieux (Old Bridge), is used by cars. Both bridges are parallel, built not far apart.





Driving in Albi is no fun. Street design is intricate. The Sainte-Cécile Square, for instance, is a superb pedestrian initiative but it's hard to understand for drivers passing through for the first time.






The Jardin Remarquable (Remarkable Garden), near Palais de la Berbie (Berbie Palace) is not all that remarkable, methinks. It's a nice French garden, no more.






Near the garden, the Tarn waterfront. The water in the Tarn is very clear.







It takes a lot of work to keep all those sites in good condition.






That’s it for Albi, we’re off to Ambialet. We head to the Priory where the Tarn is shaped a bit like the greek letter Omega. What we see are the feet of the omega. At its core, the Omega is a high rocky ridge. You can’t go all the way around the ridge but the partial tour has spectacular views.







We have lunch in Villefranche d'Albigeois. A small hotel nearly deserted. I order the fresh-water salad and I eat, I think for the first time, crayfish. Roger has a beef stew, which I find a bit ordinary but he seems to enjoy it well enough.

In the afternoon, we walk in the country around Albi, with no particular destination in mind. The sun appears and disappears, repeat. The Photographer yields to the Driver. The area is naturally beautiful, but rather poor. The villages we cross are not “pretty”.

For dinner, we ate a croissant on a park bench in Graulhet, a city that you certainly do not need to put among your top ten places to see before you die.

We leave for an evening walk. I suggest an experiment. The algorithm of the GPS route settings, in my opinion, is not very refined. You can set it to either the shortest time or the shortest distance. It often has us taking "shortcuts" that end up being longer because they are goat trails where we have to drive way more slowly - all that to shave a hundred meters or twenty seconds from the route that would keep to the main road. Since we got here, I often observed the routing devised by Maps on the iPad, and its algorithm is more refined. Roger wants to try going to to Marssac, I suggest that we try to keep to the route proposed by the iPad. Unfortunately, the iPad is necessarily dependent on 3G, so both in the narrow confined basins or the hills, sometimes you lose connexion. And you lose your way. Actually, we didn’t get “lost”, since the GPS always knows where you are and how to get to wherever you want to go, but it sent us on small, hair-rising village roads

Tomorrow will be the first day of the second half of our trip.