Carcassonne, 25th May

We wanted to get to Spain.
We wanted to see the Mediterranean.

So we aimed South and caught a train to Toulouse.

The Interrail tickets that we were travelling on allowed us to be very free and easy with our travel arrangements. As long as it wasn't an express train, or any other kind of premium service, we could catch it...for free. Well, not strictly speaking for free as we had to pay £180 for the tickets back in the UK, but the freedom they gave was magnificent. If we hadn't had any sort of plan, we could have strolled to the train station and picked a destination off the departures boards...and we would be there later that day.

So this great attitude towards travel led to us settling down on the train to Toulouse, eating lunch, writing letters, listening to music, talking about why yachties have this strange allure, and then, about an hour outside of our destination, looking it up in our small array of books.

And it wasn't there.

Which came as a bit of a surprise, seeing as Toulouse is bloody enormous, but we cross referenced the Lonely Planet with the YHA Guide to Europe, and found that, should we alight there, we would be without LP guidance in a town with no youth hostel.

I have to defend my younger self at this point. He was a bit panicky about money, more than a little worried about arriving in a city with no idea of where it would be a good place to look for a good place to stay, and while he seems overly dependent on the Lonely Planet guidebook, it is only a crutch he's had for a week or so, so don't judge him too harshly.

We began to panic. In a bid to find somewhere our train passed through that was in the guidebooks (yes, this is entirely the wrong way round) we were sticking our ears out of the windows at train stations, trying to decode -sorry, translate- the announcements over the bustle of people hefting their bags in and out of the carriages.

"Did he say Nice?"
"That's miles away!"
"Yes but did he say it?"
"SSHHHHH I'm trying to listen!"
"...grablewonky *crackle* hohnheehohnheehohn *sound of child having suitcase dropped on its foot* munkey makaa *crackle* Carcassonne *crackle* Merci. BING BING BONG!"
"Did you get any of that?"
"Is there somewhere called Carcassonne in the book?"
"Hang on...yes! Place where Robin Hood Prince of Thieves was filmed...castle...hostel...looks good. Wow, actually...Stuart, read this."

And so, two hours later, we scrabbled off the train into a train station at the top of a hill, and caught the first bus with 'La Cité' on the front. We didn't know how long it would take or what La Cité would look like when we got there, so we both stood with our backpacks on, trying not to swing around and broadside venerable old men on their way home after a hard day's boules.

So when the single decked bus swung around the crook of another hill and we found ourselves plunging across a stone bridge and into a gate that had the spikes of a portcullis lining the top, we were suddenly glued to the windows with our mouths open as we passed into a cobbled square and then swung again, impossibly widely in the tight medieval streets lined with tiny gift shops up the slope of the hill. The bus stopped, and nobody moved. The driver pulled himself round in his seat.

"L'Auberge de Jeunesse, Monsieur, Mademoiselle."
"Ah, merci."

It was early evening and the sky was paling. It was cool, and swallows were dipping and looping overhead. We walked up some steps and into an open garden courtyard bordered with small red and black tiles and found that there were just two beds spare for that night.

This should have started to ring alarm bells, but it didn't. We just thought we were very lucky. We dumped our things in a communal room with yellow pine bunk beds and went out to walk the streets. We ate a good meal and bought two very cheap small cans of Kronenbourg and went and sat on a wall on a tree-lined path outside La Cité and drank them watching the moon above the brightly-lit fortress walls.

"This is pretty good, isn't it?"
"Yeah."