Rita headed off to drive to Dijon at 0630h to beat the morning peak hour traffic around Carcassonne.

I copied my Carte de Séjour receipt to Dropbox, so that I will have it available on any device if needed in the future.

I then started re-reading "Citadel” by Kate Mosse, a story based around Carcassonne and the resistance movement in World War 2, and linked to happenings around Carcassonne in centuries past. While I enjoyed reading it the first time several years ago, reading it again while being in Carcassonne takes on a completely different flavour, since I now recognise many of the place names she mentions in the book. So today, I went for a walk around town to find some of the locations, and I show them below with the relevant quotations from the book.

"She was safe in her own bed in the house in the Rue du Palais.” (while I doubt this is the actual house, if it really exists, it gives me the feeling of the type of multi-storey house in Rue de Palais that she describes on several occasions).

"She picked up speed on her bicycle as she crossed Rue de Strasbourg, weaving in and out of the elegant platanes that lined the square behind the Palais de Justice, then left into the Rue Mazagran”.

When I saw my name painted on a house wall in “the square behind the Palais de Justice”, I somehow felt that my search for place names today was meant to be.

"The bells of Saint-Michel were ringing the half-hour as she crossed Square Gambetta,…”. The bells actually rang as I was walking through the Square. The trees in Square Gambetta probably look the same as they did in the 1940’s.

"then cycled down the Rue du Pont Vieux”.

"Then, suddenly there it was - la Cité - on the hill on the far side of the river. The sight of it never failed to take her breath away”.

Until some clown gave permission to “decorate” it with yellow stripes this year!!

"This first stretch of the bank, between the Pont Vieux and the weir above Païchérou, was the prettiest”. The weir at Païchérou was the scene of the pivotal scene in the book, when Sandrine finds the unconscious Antoine lying on the rocks.

“Floating, looking down at herself from a great height, like the stone gargoyles that grimaced at passers-by from the cathédrale Saint-Michel”.

As they did to me when I first walked past them.

“By seven thirty, he was sitting in the Café Saillan. The oldest café in Carcassonne, it was opposite Les Halles and only a few minutes from the boulevard Barbès, where the demonstrators were to gather”.  Makes one wonder what the men in this picture were talking about now.

In the afternoon, Steph came down and helped me to move the barge backwards, next to Amethyst, since a hotel barge was arriving tomorrow and needed more space.

While the mooring near the Marengo Lock has some advantages, it has one main disadvantage in the speed of the hire-boats and tourist boats as they exit the lock. Having been in the lock for a while, they see their release as an opportunity to go as fast as they can before they have to slow down for the bridge on the way out of town. The hire-boats perhaps have the excuse of ignorance, since they have probably never been told that the speed limit through ports and past moored boats is 3kph. But the tourist boats should know better; and some of them are the worst offenders!  In particular, the Lou Gabaret is a serial offender, both leaving the lock and approaching the lock from the other direction. And they set the example for all the hire-boats that see them and know no better. I made the “mistake” of asking the Lou Gabaret to slow down, and the only response I got was a raised middle finger! After that, they not only tested how fast they could go by Kanumbra, but also how close they could get as they went by. It was the Lou Gabaret that nearly cast us adrift last year, when they almost pulled out our pegs when we were wild-moored for the July 14th fireworks.

Given this experience, I thought I would do something that might educate the hire-boats (although the Lou Gabaret was probably a lost cause). Since I sometimes find myself going too fast past moored boats, because I simply wasn't paying attention,  I decided to make up a 3kph speed limit sign and stick it outside on my wheelhouse side window, to remind others of the port speed limit. I’ll monitor whether it has had any effect over the next few days!

One of the other disadvantages of this mooring location is the crowd that gathers in the afternoon and evening, on the grass areas beside the moorings. Most people are just relaxing and enjoying the sunshine, but some groups look like they are looking for trouble (they probably aren’t) and others forget that people are trying to live on the adjacent boats. Today, for example, I got into a "loudness contest" with a phone user on the grassed area. He was calling all his mates on his mobile phone, and speaking at the top of his voice (he didn’t really need the phone; everyone in Carcassonne could probably hear him!). So, after an hour of this, I decided to make it a contest to see who could talk loudest! I dialled an imaginary friend and had a long “conversation” at the top of my voice to try to drown him out. But I could only keep going for 10 minutes because I had run out of things to say! And it had had no effect.

So I resorted to an old trick I’d heard of to keep teenagers away, by playing classical music. I found the classical music station on the radio, and turned it up loud. But that was even too painful for me. So instead I played some songs on my iPhone through the radio’s Bluetooth connection (at just enough volume to drown out the phone man), and spent the next few hours working on this blog while listening to albums by Rag’n’Bone Man and Santana. By the time they finished, he was gone.