The morning dawned overcast, but that was not a worry since we intended to do lots of walking around Carcassonne, particularly La Cité, today. As we walked through the town that morning, Ian decided that he would buy a sling for his arm, since his shoulder had given him lots of trouble when trying to sleep last night. Taking the pressure off it might help in the recovery process.

As we reached the bridge to La Cité we looked down and saw another coypu in the Aude River. This one was much more visible, and bigger, than the one we saw last night.

And then as we walked over the bridge, Ian and Flis got their first glimpse of La Cité (just like Sandrine). I decided to make up for the less than perfect photo of Flis last night, by getting this shot of her and Bristow (with arm in sling) in front of La Cité.

Having been to La Cité several times myself, I have seen and photographed many of the most popular features already. Also, there was no point taking panorama shots because of the yellow stripes, so I was looking for something different; shots of the unusual or unexpected things. For example, it’s not often you get a raptor photo-bombing your shot of the towers and the surrounding countryside!

When we went inside the church, there just happened to be someone up a very tall ladder changing globes on the chandelier. And the prayer candles and the single up-light gave this corner of the church a very sedate feeling.

After having lunch in the same café as Pans on Fire did in 2014, we walked around for another hour or so, enjoying the fact that there were relatively few tourists here today; perhaps the season, perhaps the weather.

As we were leaving, I spotted these two draft horses with doilies on their heads!

We then went for a short walk through the adjacent cemetery, where I found the Tomb of the Unknown Cricketer - you’re out!

I found this view from the cemetery interesting - the juxtaposition of tombstones and towers keeps you guessing.

After several hours of wandering around La Cité, we decided to head back to the barge, stopping for another coffee along the way. That evening, we had dinner again at the Terminus, but it didn’t seem to be as good as last night, perhaps because, not wanting to be creatures of habit, we all changed of selection of dishes. Perhaps we should have gone again with what we enjoyed last night!

On the way home, we saw multiple smaller coypu on the lawn, but there were too many people with their dogs hanging around for us to want to take photos. So we just stored the memory in our brains, and walked on.