Carcassone to Belondrade (just outside Castelnaudary)

It's early Thursday morning and Jim and Christine are heading off to the train station to catch a ride to Toulouse Airport and Greece.

20 Locks Today

We have the most locks to handle in one day for this whole trip and I'm concerned we will struggle. I was wrong. We did too well, much too well, we almost made it all the way to Castelnaudary in this one day. It seems we finally got the hang of the locks and we were also lucky in that many of the locks were open and waiting for us as we approached. We didn't really have to wait for any of them.

A very cool bridge as we were leaving Carcassonne.

First lock of the day.

And breakfast while we wait at the First lock of the day. Annie made porridge and I topped it off with the bottle of Ameretti we had (I was trying to finish it off so I wouldn't have to pack it).

It was threatening to rain today, and a bit cool, which is why you see me wearing my rain jacket. In the last hour or so of the day it actually did rain and was a bit miserable, but we continued on as there was nothing else to do.

We kept following the same boat for a lot of the day.

We met a nice German crew of the Euro Classic boat "Alice", and stopped on the side of the canal after lunch to have a drink and a chat and check out each others boat.

The weather turned wet by the end of the day and we lost sight of "Alice", their's was a slowish boat with no bow thrusters and hard to handle. Even though it was raining, we pressed on as there was no decent place to stop for dinner. We ended up in a suburb of Castelnaudary called Belondrade, which was just a couple of kilometers from the last qaudruple lock into Castelnaudary. It was too late to go into that lock, so we docked for the night (in the rain) on the side of the canal on a bend just after the double lock of Écluse de Gay.

We made dinner from whatever left overs we had left.