Two months just flew by!

Wow, that went fast! I thought I was going to write a post after our trip to the Toulouse area, but I wanted to sort out the pictures, first. That's where I made a mistake. I still haven't sorted them out.

After the July 14 parade, during which the planes seemed to be flying even lower as they went over our house, we left on Monday in order to arrive in Blagnac early enough on Tuesday to pick up the first of the Americans we spent a week with. We spent that Monday night in Brives-la-Gaillarde, a busy town, even on a Monday, when most shops are closed. There are not as many empty shops as we've become used to seeing in town centers. There were plenty of people in the streets and at the cafés.
On Tuesday morning, we arrived at the gîte in Blagnac where we stayed last year for the big family reunion. You might recognize the hens. They no longer lay eggs, but still peck around the yard.
First off, who was on this trip. As usual, I will not mention full names, which I know is annoying to some, but the other participants deserve their privacy. P -- my husband, K&S -- K is my cousin from LA and S, his wife. R&J -- from New York, R is a high school friend of K's and J, his wife. JT -- our Nogent neighbor who sent his elder son to K&S's house about 30 years ago to improve his English and has been a friend of K&S since then. Both R and JT are psychiatrists and have been friends since K&S introduced them. Seven people, two cars (ours and JT's).
K&S arrived at the airport, just 5 minutes from the house, in the morning. They had time to get settled in and we went to lunch across the street at a pizzeria, the first of the excellent restaurants on the street. Finished lunch and went back to the airport for R&J. That first day, we didn't budge from Blagnac. We went for a walk late in the afternoon, but everyone was just a ready for a relaxing day before we hit the tourist road.

Toulouse
France was in a heat wave. Toulouse is already very hot in summer, but in this heat wave, it was unbearably hot, but we survived. We started at Saint Sernin, from there walked to the Jacobins, where P finished high school, to the Garonne waterside for some refreshing drinks and more and more walking. We enjoyed a nice lunch on a terrace and then had to get back to the cars at Saint Sernin. The one thing missing was a swimming pool and we were just too tired to walk over to the Blagnac public pool.
Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges
Next on our to-do list was a drive down to Saint-Bertrand de Comminges in the foothills of the Pyrenees. This is a pilgrimage site on the way to Santiago de Compostela. It's a beautiful site. There aren't too many tourists, so you can actually see what you are visiting. However, it's become such an attraction that you have to park in a field at the bottom of the hill and there's a little train to take you up. They don't really indicate where you are supposed to get on the train. There was a a little bus/train stop looking place at the far end of the parking lot and we thought that was it. It wasn't. Once we did get to the train and saw there were three stops on the hill, we asked where we should get off. The driver just said it didn't matter. I had to be very specific in my question, where should we get off where we had the least walking to do. (K had a back ache and none of us really wanted to do a lot of uphill climbing in the heat, anyway.) Visiting the cathedral is free, but the cloisters visit is not. From the cloisters there's a gorgeous view of the valley and the cloisters are pleasant to just walk around. We got a combined ticket so that we could visit the basilica Saint-Just, just in the plain below Saint-Bertrand. We went there after lunch. Lunch was excellent -- on the terrace under a linden tree -- but very, very long. I prefer Saint-Just. It's a simple Romanesque church built with recycled stones, many of which seem to have been from Roman Empire times. While waiting for the others to finish up their visit, P and I had a nice chat with the woman at the ticket booth. She's from La Réunion and wants to visit Paris. We had hoped to drive up into the Pyrenees, so close, but lunch had taken up so much time, we just went back to Blagnac after Saint-Just. That happened to us, again, the very next day.
When we got back to Blagnac, we found, as expected, Em.&G, and a friend of G's from Switzerland. He had just flown in and they were going to spend the night in Blagnac with us and then go into Toulouse on Friday for art supplies. We had an excellent dinner at Le Temps Moderne, on the main street of Blagnac.

MoissacWe spent a morning at Moissac, visiting the gigantic Saint-Pierre church, part of the old abbey. Again, this is on one of the trails to Santiago de Compostela. The stone carvings are fascinating and there are beautiful, colored wood sculptures in the church. Both JT and P had insisted we visit, here, and they were right. But enough of churches!
We took them to Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val for lunch at l'Auberge des Sens. We got there a little later than expected and after lunch spent quite a while walking around the town. It's so pleasant when it's not a market day, although, it seemed the lack of tourists is a problem this year. By the time we were ready to leave, it was deemed too late to drive the short distance up to Em&G's place and spend an hour. That's really a shame, but we thought we'd go up on Monday for even a longer visit.

Saturday, some went back into Toulouse, P and I stayed in Blagnac. Sunday, we all went to Albi. I love how they've restored the interior of the cathedral. We've been there several times in the past few years. It's one of my favorite places to visit in France. The cathedral takes a long time to visit, especially if you want to take in the choeur and the treasury. And after the cathedral, there's the Toulouse-Lautrec museum, with a little stop at the garden on the side. Lunch and a longer visit to the garden before finding the cars and heading back "home". JT flew back to Paris for a funeral and came back on Monday evening.
Monday, everyone was tired of the long drives, so instead of going up to Em&G's place, we went back into Toulouse. We split up with a meeting point for lunch and later meeting point for the river/canal cruise -- not recommended. During the split up time, P and I went for a long walk to the garden and then to the canal, to where he used to live. We had lunch with K&S. and then joined the others at 2. We even managed to get on an earlier cruise than we'd reserved, but really, the cruise is avoidable. For us, it was an opportunity to be seated and in the shade.

The week was coming to an end. On Tuesday morning, we visited the Airbus 380 facility. It's a shame the plane has not been the success it was expected to be. They will have to shut down production. We then spent another hour, or so, in the museum. We thought we'd have lunch on site and got to the restaurant at 11:45, but they couldn't seat us, even though it was empty, because it was all reserved. My own feeling is that when there is only one food outlet at a tourist attraction, they should maintain a percentage of the seating for walk-ins, first come-first served. The rest of the day was just relaxing and packing. Wednesday, off to the airport and we drove up to Najac and JT went the opposite direction to continue his vacation with friends.

A big family weekend

May is the month of long weekends.  May 1st was on a Monday and that coincided with the May Bank Holiday in the UK, so Claire organized a family get together. It was supposed to be a big family birthday celebration since it's so hard to come together on birthdays. So why not designate a date that we could all agree upon? She queried us all about our availability for the date. She set the place as Toulouse because it's not really all that hard for us to get there. The Parisians and Brits could fly in. Paul and I drove down because we expected to extend the weekend. Emma and Gabriel live only an hour and a half away, by car.
Add to that the difficulty of seeing the Lebelle cousins more than once in a while and never together, which led to extending the invitation (for a Sunday lunch) to Pierre and Gillette's family. They answered the call and we were really looking forward to having everyone, but a couple of weeks before the date, one of theirs had to drop out. He was returning to France from a business trip just the day before and had to leave on another the day after, so his family stayed home. And another of our nieces just finished her exams and stayed home. That meant a group of 21 instead of 26 for Sunday lunch. Not bad!

The participants and some extended family have received a link to the shared online photo album and since almost all the pictures are personal, of us, I'm not sharing them, here. However, here is a photo of the yard of the house we rented. We had a cat and three chickens.
It was a big old farm house with lots of rooms that had been transformed into small apartments big enough for each to have a separate bedroom, living room area, bath or shower, and kitchenette. Each family unit had its own apartment ("gite"). On the ground floor, there was a big kitchen and living room, so we didn't use the kitchenettes in our apartments. We arrived on Friday and, after a little rest, went to the airport for Anne, came home, had a spaghetti dinner before I returned to the airport to pick up the British contingent. Saturday morning, I returned to the airport for the Parisian group and those arriving from Tarn-et-Garonne arrived. Claire had a visit from one of her Toulouse friends and, after a pizza lunch (really good pizza, for once), we headed off on the tram to visit the Airbus site, where we had a visit to the A380 assembly hangar. It being the May 1st weekend (that's the sacred Labor Day, here), the line was closed down, but we could see just how enormous those planes are. It's a shame the guide we had was not more enthusiastic. She rattled off her numbers and was a bit impatient with kids who were trying to ask questions.
Sunday, we walked along the Garonne to the restaurant, where we met up with the others. I think we all had a good time: loads of varied conversation. The children all played well, together. V. is closer to adulthood and seemed pleased to discover her dad's cousins. We continued the visit back at the house until they had to leave. Monday, May 1st, everything was closed -- almost everything. There was no public transportation, no tram. Some took our car to go into Toulouse for a short visit, a walk around the city center. Others went into Toulouse in the afternoon, after the first family left to return to Paris, and took a boat ride on the river. We emptied the house and dropped the last ones, the British contingent, at the airport late in the afternoon and headed towards Najac.
Spring is so lovely. There is such variety in green. Everything seems to be green, except the colza, which is in full yellow bloom. This is the southwest and there is a water deficit. In summer, it'll be all dried up but for now, it's beautiful. Our home away from home is the Hotel Le Belle Rive, where we are really welcomed as old friends. We spent Tuesday with Emma and Gabriel, but because I had a sore throat and back ache, we decided not to prolong the stay and returned home on Wednesday.

We had an adventure! A tire blew out. A few years ago, this happened to me in England, the right front tire. Well, this time it was the left back tire. We were very lucky to find the emergency phone safety zone just a couple of hundred meters away. We called; a really short time after, the highway emergency van came by with a very friendly guy. Handshakes all around. He called the local garage to find out how long they would be, but almost as soon as he hung up, they were there. They installed the spare tire you are not supposed to drive much on in a very short time and we were also very lucky that the next exit was just a couple of km. away. This gave us the chance to drive slowly through the green countryside, again, where we saw lots of sheep (and lambs) and cows (and calves) and wheat fields, still green, and colza, all yellow. The idea was to find a tire shop somewhere on the way to Limoges, and we did. In fact, in the shopping zone just outside of Limoges and on the road we were on (no extra detours!) there were two shops opposite one another, Feu Vert and Norauto! Once the tires were mounted, we had a quick lunch and hit the A20. I think the entire tire incident cost us less time than the traffic jam around Paris, when we hit it before 5 pm. We didn't get home until well after 6.
The only thing I'm going to say about the election is that I'll vote early, tomorrow and I don't know if I'll volunteer to count the votes as I did two weeks ago.