In Narbonne: a walk along the Canal de la Robine

November 25, 2018

For breakfast this morning we walked to Les Halles, Narbonne’s large indoor market. It’s a large complex, with many stalls serving everything you can imagine. We stopped in there last year t pick up lunch for a day ride, and Rachael’s been dreaming of it ever since. She thinks we’ll have breakfast there all three mornings.

It’s a bit of a disappointment as a breakfast spot though - there aren’t that many eat-in options, few places to sit down, and most stalls are still shut down this early in the AM. Tomorrow, we’ll try my choice, the place we had breakfast last year. The loved that place, and have been thinking about going back ever since. I’m secretly pretty glad that breakfast at the market isn’t all we hoped it would be.

After breakfast we spend a bit of time looking around before scurrying back to our room to warm up, but it’s still pretty chilly out. For a better and sunnier look at this place, here’s Last year’s visit to Narbonne.

Narbonne’s wonderful, unfinished gothic cathedral is gift wrapped for Xmas. Looks like a terrific stocking stuffer!

The plan for the day is a bike ride northwest of town, but we decide to wait for conditions to improve. The forecast is for some chance of rain this morning, followed by gradual clearing. We aren’t planning a long ride, so we might as well wait a bit.

At eleven, we’re about to get ready to go, when our host shows up. He’s from Sydney, is quite social, and once I start factoring in his strong accent I can mostly understand him. We have a nice chat, we hear about him and his three month old son, and discuss bikes. In fact, he’s just returned from a bike ride and is surprised that we’re about to set out now. When we see him out the door, we see why - the forecast was off, and it’s raining.

Our host, riding off to work at a nearby bar on his Mercier. The m sorry I don’t know his name, but when he introduced himself I was still baffled by his accent,

So, we scrap the bike ride idea and decide to take a walk instead. We wait a bit longer, and once the showers stop we set out along the canal de la Robine, the canal that runs from Narbonne nine to the coast which we biked along in the way to town yesterday. We have the idea that we’ll walk south a ways and then climb up into the hills a bit, hoping for a view of the mountains. We never get the views though, because there are no paths from the canal into the hills without going far south.

It’s still a great walk though. Rachael and I walk together for the first three miles, and then she continues on while I turn back and poke along with the camera. Not the plan we started out with, but still a great way to start the day.

I’ve always been attracted to the peeling bark pattern of plane trees, but I’ve never looked closely enough to see how interesting the surface is close up.

For dinner, we walk across the canal to a nice Italian restaurant. Rachael had been hoping to dine at a nice fish place we saw yesterday, but it’s Sunday and they’re closed - along with nearly every place else, actually. Vent in a larger place like Narbonne, it’s still very quiet this late in the year.

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