darrenanna's blog

We woke after a good nights sleep and made our way into Luxembourg city (not to be confused with Luxembourg the country or Luxembourg the state in Belgium!!). We parked near the city and wandered along streets which were rather amazing because of the deep gully which ran through the town. The banks of which are the remains of a huge castle dating to 920AD. We stumbled across a market and had loads of fun buying food for lunch.

The rain of Sunday had passed and we boarded the train for Paris. We couldn't find a ticket booth anywhere so just jumped on (much to Anna's horror) and bought the tickets at the next station with help from some very friendly French people. Most people here are happy to accommodate our lack of French. We got off the train 20mins later at the Eiffel tower and took many photos before heading off to the Arc de Triumph to take photos of that as well, in fact, the day consisted of walking to one great monument/building after another, each so grand that many photos were required. Anna even took photos of bakery windows. We did a walking tour of Paris going to Notre Dame, we went up Centre Pompidou to look at the amazing view, and wandered around The Lourve castle buildings before heading back to the camp ground. This morning we were sad to leave the camp ground we had grown to love so much, it was a bit of a find, being right in the middle of Versailles, and far better than any of the other campgrounds we had been to. All the staff spoke English a little and our main contact, Emmanuelle, had just been to New Zealand so took extra special care of us. For anyone else travelling in the area, we highly recommend "Huttopia". It took us a long time to get through the urban area of Paris, and we headed east towards Luxembourg. We spent the day on back roads which were as straight as pins (thanks to the Romans we assume), driving through rolling lush agricultural areas and stopping in sleepy little villages. Once again we are at a rest area for the night, having had tinned lentils for dinner!!!

We got in to France and decided to head straight for the city of Nimes as it looked like it had some interesting places to see. It was founded by Caesar Augustus so as you can imagine it was jam packed full of history. We haved based ourselves at a camp ground for a couple of days so spent Saturday looking around the old part of town.
These are the things we did.
1. (Anna) had a coffee in the catherdral square, looking like the typical French person, after which we had a quick look at the cathedral

2. We went to the les Halles market which had all kinds of stores. Meat, cheese, veges, flowers, sea food, olives, bread & pasteries. Anna greatly admired the variety of unnameable sea creatures available for eating
3. We stopped in at a number of museums which all seemed to be free today
4. We went to the Roman gladiator arena. It was in the top 20 of the 400 arenas with Rome's Colosseum being the biggest, but these days the Nimes Arena is the best preserved, so it was a real treat to walk around. As well as all the history, the arena is now one of the few places authorised for bull fighting outside of Spain

Foix is the town we stayed in at the foot of the Pyrenees. It was beautiful, nestled between mountains on either side. Lucky for us "camping" is the same in French so it's easy to find campgrounds. We chose this town because of the chateau des Foix, which stands smack in the middle of town on the top of it's own little mountain. The next morning we drove around & round before we found the entrance!