Climbing

We spent most of the day climbing, or at least trying to find the "Gymnase" secteur after a much longer than necessary walk via "Le Grand Toit". After an unsteady start on some easy stuff (relent d'ail), we got into our rhythm and basked in the pocketed glory of Le Tarn. I was happy to do "Plus jamais peut etre" on sight with my still injured ham string! As I was pulling the rope, I saw something get dislodged 30 meters above. This kind of thing happens a lot, and it's usually a small rock or leaf that gets hit by the rope and then falls to the ground. However, this was falling much slower than a rock but a lot faster than a leaf, and I stared at it as it reached the midpoint at around fifty feet. Much to my surprise it turned out to be a baby lizard, waving all four of its legs like crazy, and obviously not very happy at how it's day was going.

On the way back to Ste. Enemie to pick up the parental units, we concocted a story to trick them: we would claim that we had found *another* castle which happened to be a hotel which was much bigger and more impressive than the one that we were supposed to be staying in. The plan was to distract my mom, since she knew the name of where were staying, pull in to the parking lot of Chateau de la Caze, ooohing and aahing and saying how much better *this* castle was, then stop and casually walk into the castle. It all went off like a charm and kenji and gail were thoroughly fooled.

Here is La Caze, and a few views from the grounds



The rooms were fantastic, with a claw footed bathtub and beautiful bathroom in the turret!

and windows overlooking the grounds

There were trout of some kind in the moat, but some of them were so huge that I initially thought they were carp. There was one in particular which looked to be almost two feet long. You can see it in the middle of the photo below. Keep in mind that this was taken from the second story, and the moat is a story below the ground floor

Kenji and I discovered a nice balcony overlooking the river



and then we headed downstairs for another excellent dinner. It started with amuses bouches of trout sashimi (a first for me) followed by perfectly cooked cod and a moelleux au chocolat. We also ordered a half bottle of the excellent languedoc wine called "les paradines" (2003).