A short walk in the Corbières

Today was a public holiday in France, so we decided to go out to Sallèles d'Aude to visit the annual marché aux potiers and maybe have lunch. I love a nice pot, so I thought I would have to keep my buying impulses strictly under control. But we found all the pots surprisingly resistible. I quite liked some of them, but not enough to spend money on them. I took a few photos anyway, and a couple of them turned out quite well; I made a small set on Flickr.

The only lunch on offer was hot dogs and chips. Erm, no thanks. Instead, on impulse we went into Narbonne and decided to walk down the Barques and have lunch in the first place that took our fancy, which turned out to be cheap and cheerful En Face. It was a very hot day, and arriving at 1:30, we just snagged the last table in the shade. After lunch, since we were in Narbonne and we hadn't seen J and B for ages, we spontaneously called in on them and had a nice catch up in the coolness of their air-conditioned flat.

We hadn't intended to stay out so long; it was almost six o'clock when we got home, so we packed up quickly and headed for our night out: walking up Alaric with a picnic to watch shooting stars from the ruined chapel of St Michel de Nahuze. It was a hard slog up there -- eventually S went on ahead and had the airbed blown up and the aperos out by the time I staggered up, ready to keel over. It was a beautiful clear, windless evening. We picnicked on smoked salmon, foie gras, and pêches de vigne, washed down with white wine.

We had lugged the camera and tripod up in the hope of photographing stars, but it turned out I should have read the camera manual and tried it out first. Even on fully manual settings, with a shutter speed of 30 seconds, I couldn't persuade it to take photos in the dark -- apart from one of a random bush illuminated by my head torch. So in the end we gave up and just lay on the airbed and looked up at the stars. In the space of ten minutes, we saw five shooting stars, a couple of them quite spectacular. I bet I wouldn't have caught them on camera anyway, and it was nice to just appreciate them. By the time we fell asleep we hadn't seen any more, and when I woke later it had clouded over.