Beziers, Locks and bad parents

Today, after a breakfast of coffee, muesli, yoghurt and juice - yes, not a baguette in sight, we jumped in our groovy Renault Grand Scenic, set the GPS and roared off towards Beziers. There are so many interesting places that are all within an hours drive of St Chinian. Thankfully, I have quickly got the hang of this driving a manual car with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road.

Beziers 

The main reason we were going to Beziers was to visit the famous Ecluses de Fonserannes. Oh, and to go to lunch :) The Ecluses de Fonserannes or the Locks of Fonserranes are a World Heritage site and are a series of 8 locks that allow water craft travelling along the Canal du Midi to kind of go up hill or to climb an elevation of 21.5 metres. The boats enter the first lock which eventually closes behind them. Water pours in, and I mean pours in and the boat rises to the next lock. They then move through and the process is repeated. Its quite a sight to see and I hope that you can understand or imagine what I mean. If any of you watched Rick Steins France series - the one with him cruising the very same Canal du Midi on a barge - you will know exactly what I mean. Ben loved it.

Ecluse

It was a pretty warn day, so once we had watched the locks working for a while, we were keen on a drink and something to eat. In other words, fuck the World Heritage site - whats for lunch? We entered Centre Ville (or the middle of the city) into the GPS, parked the car and found a sweet little restaurant for the 4 of us. We had a superb lunch of beef and scalloped potatoes and a demi bouteille (half bottle) of vin rouge. Chris and I then had cheese and the kiddies had a dessert each - tiramisu for Monsieur Red and a chocolate fondant for Madame Blond. We were told that the fondant takes 10 minutes to cook, which of course did not surprise us. All was good but we were surprised to have the merlot served fridge cold. At a subsequent tasting later that day in St Chinian, our wine guy was surprised by this so not sure what was going on. We didn't know, this could have been normal so we just drank our chilled merlot quietly and relatively contently.

Cold vin rouge

We then set our sights for home - only 25 minutes away. We were in the mood for some wine so Chris and I left the kids doing their homework (good kids) and we visited one of the 2 local wine shops to taste some wine. Unfortunately the wine tasting was gratuit or free (!) and there was only 30 of them to try! To cut a long story short, we tried some fabulous wines of the region. We didnt make it to the end - only really because we were feeling a little guilty that we were taking up too much of the wine guy's time. I suppose we should really should have been feeling guilty for leaving our kids at home while were out getting drunk, but to be honest this didn't once even cross our minds. Are we bad? Don't answer that.

After the standard semi drunken wine purchase, we walked home and cooked a beautiful meal from the things that we had picked up at the market. What a day. Tomorrow - off to Carcasonne

Semi inebriated wine purchase