Toulouse

Chateau Margaux. As a post script to yesterday, we took a walk to the Margaux church last evening, a short distance from our hotel and on the border of the property of Chateau Margaux. These are very pampered vines. This morning as we awoke the sun continued to shine and nicely highlighted both the name plate for our room and the neighbouring 2eme Grand Cru Classe of Rauzan-Segla.

The drive to Toulouse was pretty slick and we arrived at the hotel by 12:30. We booked into a fairly new Ibis Styles, right off the autoroute and a short distance from downtown. Just as a point of fact, the photo here was taken later this evening when we returned from dinner.

After unloading the car, we immediately set out for the core of old Toulouse. This is a university and aerospace city of around 7500000 people and driving into its centre it was immediately obvious that this was not a big city like Bordeaux or Paris. It was actually easy to get around in this city and we quickly found central parking adjacent to the the ancient cathedral of St. Etienne.

What struck us immediately about Toulouse was the amount of brick used in the architecture. Everywhere else it stone, but here, brick dominated almost every building.

We hit Toulouse over the lunch hour and therefore everything was closed, so we were flying a little blind and as we wandered about we just had to guess where to head next. I think we got a feel for the old Toulouse but surely missed some key features. Lunch was at a little bistro next to St. Etienne.

Regular readers of my blog might wonder about my lack of French haut couture on this trip, so now I'll add three photos representing interesting fashion statements from Toulouse.

Suffice it to say, the picture of the ladies in traditonal garb was all about a group of Brittany performers with bagpipes that we came upon. Gotta love serendipity! Following our brief tour, we were back to the hotel, after a gas up stop and had some slow time before we headed out to the Campanile Hotel, a kilometre down the road, for dinner. It was, in fact the only restaurant in the area for us, unless we drove back to the heart of Toulouse or unless we succumbed to MacDonalds. This restaurant/hotel was adjacent to the Cite d'Espace, a space museum set up in 1997, to tie in with the Airbus industry which, today, is the heart of Toulouse's economy.

Back at the Ibis it was card and Scotch time and we were pretty happy that this was our last night on the road.