A long walk in the sun

Yesterday, as promised, we had a walking adventure. We took the tram from just outside our door, to the end of the line in the south. From the end of the line, we could have taken a bus, but that would have been too easy, so we headed off on a 3km walk to Carnon, which is a thriving port city for pleasure craft. I have never seen so many sailboats and motorboats......thousands it seemed. We found a patisserie, which was our first goal and had coffee, croissant for Les and pain au raisin pour moi. And then we retraced our steps so get to the other side of the huge harbour, headed toward the beach, and walked for about 5km on this.

Some hotels and private houses on one side and water as far as you could see on the other. I thought that maybe if I waved hard enough and long enough, Stefan, Hannah and Sal could see me. (Trin, if on the beach, would be eating sand, so I knew he wouldn't even look up.) The town in the far disance was Palavas and what a town it was. Restaurants, cafés and ice cream shops galore. The moules frites looked particularly good and we promised ourselves that next time, we would stop and enjoy them, hopefully on a bicycle trip. All this commerce stood on either side of this canal.

I stopped for an ice cream and then we headed off again towards the Cathédrale de Maguelone, which our friends Don and Jude, from Melbourne, had told us about. Well.........we walked and we walked. We passed lovely maps with "vous êtes ici", but whoever was charged with putting the signs up, didn't realize that there was an order to be followed, so at times we appeared, on the maps, to be going backwards. It was quite funny actually.  We passed many signs guiding us to the cathedral, but when it finally came into view, it would have been at least another 2km, which doesn't sound like much, but that's another 4km on sore knees and hot sun, so again, we decided to leave it until we return on bicycles. The church is interesting, in that many towns have no history, but this is a history without a town. Apparently it started as a Phoenician or Etruscan trading post, prospered under the Romans and Visigoths and became the seat of a bishop. Although the town was destroyed by the 800s, the area still had salt, and so that powerful and progressive multinational, the Church, took it over. The Cathédrale de Maguelone was saved from ruin and restored in the 1870s, so when we do visit, we will have a lot of history to absorb.

We walked 2km back along the beach, another 1/2 km on the road and waited for the bus, which took us to the tram, which took us to the Géant Casino, where we bought lettuce and Dorade...a fish. The fish is weighed with head and guts in, and then scalled and cleaned, but no beheaded, then stuffed in a bag with a self adhesive close and then a plastic bag. We are pretty sure the Dorade is the Dorado that we loved in Mexico and certainly the taste was terrific. Another km walk to the apt. so we stayed in for hallowe'en, enjoying the fish, some ratatouille some of the zuchinni bread that I had made.