Toulouse - Le Trek
Destination Monesties in the beautiful Tarn departement of France. A short flight to Toulouse, then we picked up a hire car to drive to Monesties in the stunning rustic French countryside. We didn’t do an awful lot apart from swim, eat, drink, and catch up with our friends and their family in their amazing house with views over the valley to die for, and beautiful sunsets and clear unpolluted night sky, but we did have a lovely day out in Cordes, a charming hill village about half an hour’s drive away – though the walk up to the top was not quite so charming, especially as the temperature was about 40 degrees centigrade that day!! After a much needed beer and rest at the top it was a real pleasure to browse the boutiques and craft shops and numerous cafes and then have a leisurely lunch before embarking on the steep slope back down to the car.
We also visited St Antonin Noble Val (setting for the film the One Hundred Foot Journey) to meet up with some other friends Karen and James who live close by – and that is another charming village. We visited the gite that they run and spent a very enjoyable (and again very warm!) afternoon catching up and meeting all their animals – 2 cats, 2 dogs, 3 goats, 2 llamas and a well-stocked fish pond!
A midday flight out on Friday and a late flight back on Monday only gave us three full days, but we are already planning to return to explore this area properly – what we saw we absolutely loved and would like to see more of.
Our journey home was eventful – a three hour delay and then we were diverted into Stansted when we should have landed at Gatwick, arriving home at 4.30am with the car still at Gatwick (as we live a lot closer to Stansted and at that time of the morning it made more sense to get a taxi home and get some sleep!), so the things I am definitely going to consider in future and which I recommend to you based on my own recent experiences are:
1. Stay at an airport hotel the night before a flight if you live more than an hour’s drive from the airport and your flight is before 2pm. Much more relaxing all round as traffic can cause HUGE unexpected delays, especially on the M25!
2. Avoid a late flight if you can – a late evening flight always has a higher chance of delay after any knock on effects from earlier in the day.
3. If you do take a late flight consider taking a taxi or getting a lift to and from the airport instead of driving and parking JUST in case your flight gets diverted. Very rare but it CAN happen - as I have just experienced!
No more trips planned for this year, but counting down already to our Norway holiday in January - see you then!
