A trip to the south of France, but no painting.

I am just back from the South of France, Carcasonne and the Lanquedoc area. Warm sunshine, and occaissional showers but a nice change from the miserable weather over here.





We had a great time walking around Carcassone old city and along the river Aude.


















I spent a lot of time watching the fish in the river and the Gheckos in the walls.

We took a short boat trip down the Canal de Midi too.

Sadly we only had three days, but we enjoyed every minute of our stay.
Incedently we stayed at The Royal Hotel
22 Boulevard Jean Jaurès CARCASSONNE 11000, which at only 45 euro per night for the two of us was excellent value for spotlessly clean rooms with albeit small ensuite, all mod cons, phone and TV.
The staff were very pleasant too.

We did not manage to get to the Art gallery which was just sround the corner.... ...we were too busy enjoying the sunshine,..... but next time...













I did not take a sketch book or similar as I knew I would not have time to paint while we were there, but in a way I'm sorry I didn't because I could have done a couple of quick watercolours while we sat down by the river and outside the old City.

Back from Our travels

We are back from Nice and the Cote D'azur in the french riviera. We also visited Montecarlo in Monaco which is just a short bus ride up the coast from Nice. The coastal landscape is interesting, and as we were flying into Nice I had an amazing view of the coastline west of the airport itself as we approached the airport parallel to the shoreline. The Public bus service in the area is very reasonable, at 4 euro you can get the bus from the airport and unlimited use of local busses and trams for the day. Obviously we did a lot of our touring and sightseeing by bus and tram, it sure beats paying through the nose on our own public transport at home.

The bus to Montecarlo was only 2 euro for a return ticket. It is a nice trip along the coast too. I preferred Nice to Montecarlo, even though Montecarlo had some great specimens of the giant white strelitzia plants. It was amazing to see these bird-of-paradise flowers towering over the banana trees beside them. I had to look twice to check which were trees and which were strelitzias. There were many standard strelitzias flowering all over Nice and Montecarlo. Also Montecarlo was in the process of preparing for next months Grandprix motor race so there were barriers and viewing platforms being erected all over the place, which made it quite scruffy.

Sadly we did not have the time to visit all the sites immortalised by the impressionists in the area, nor to any of the art galleries in the area which include galleries devoted to Renoir, Matisse and Chagall among others.