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Our 16th stop on this jaunt around France was Cahors, a city of 20,000 in southwest France just a couple hours north of Toulouse. Cahors is all but surrounded by the River Lot as it makes a big looping curve to encircle the city on three sides. It makes for a lovely, compact town with an historic center and fabulous medieval bridge.

Certainly the most interesting, even iconic site in Cahors is the Valentré Bridge, dating from the 14th century. These days it is still used as a footbridge to cross the Lot and is part of the Camino de Santiago, linking Le Puy-en-Velay, France, to Santiago, Spain. And indeed as we wandered around the old town we saw more than a couple hikers who sure looked as though they were heading to Spain.

Two things about the town stood out to me besides the bridge. First, this is the center of the Cahors wine district, a strictly defined area of Malbec wines. And while we are by far more familiar with the Malbecs of Argentina (which, of course, came from France), the Cahors Malbecs were really good and some of the darkest wines – almost black – I’ve ever had.

The other thing I love about Cahors is a piece of history. In medieval times Cahors financiers actually charged interest on loans. Today that doesn’t seem so unusual but at the time usury, as it was known, was a terrible sin. They were so infamous that the word Cahorsins became synonymous with usury throughout much of Western Europe. In fact, in Dante’s Inferno he ranked Cahors right along Sodom as a city of sin. Cool!

So here we are in Toulouse, France’s fourth largest city. This was planned as just another of those French cities we’ve never been to, but then it got added value for us when first our friend Gena figured out that she could come at the same time and then suggested to her friend Carol that she come too. Gena & Carol are both classical musicians and both were performing in Europe this summer, so why not come through Toulouse, right?

Actually Gena comes here pretty regularly. She has a great friend from New York, Kiki, who after COVID moved with her husband Yaron to a country house in the area that had been her parents second home. There’s an interesting back story there. Her father was French, but not from that region. He did, however, join the resistance during WW II and served in the area. He moved to New York after the war, but when they were looking for a second residence, it was the place with the most meaning to him. Apparently he was deeply respected in the community and when he died, they brought his body back here to be buried with great ceremony. Buried in the Protestant cemetery, amusingly, even though he was Jewish, because of course you couldn’t bury a Jew in the Catholic cemetery!

At any rate on one glorious day the three of us – Mark, Gena, and Kiki – took a train about an hour out to the tiny town of Puylaurens where Yaron (Kiki’s Israeli-born husband) picked us up for the 10-minute drive to their … castle? That’s what Gena calls it, and it is in fact a few hundred years old with a couple of towers. I don’t know how many acres it sits on but it’s all by itself on a hill overlooking miles and miles of gorgeous fields. Kiki & Yaron had prepared this glorious lunch of fresh local produce with delightful wine from their daughter’s own winery. We just sat outside – in the shade thank goodness – and had pretty much a perfect afternoon.

A word or two about Toulouse. As I said after Paris, Marseille, and Lyon it is the fourth largest city. Sitting on the River Garonne, it is the capital of the Region of Occitania and, with the headquarters of Airbus, is the center of the European aerospace industry. To be honest, we didn’t see any aerospacing going on, but I believe them that it’s there. Because of the peculiar brick used in many of the buildings of the old city it is known as the Pink City.

We didn’t do a lot of sight-seeing in Toulouse, in part because we spent one full day out in the country. The one must-see site, though, is the Basilica of Saint-Sernin, one of the two largest remaining Romanesque buildings in Europe. The original church on the site gained fame when, according to legend, Charlemagne himself gave them hundreds of relics; i.e., bones of dead saints. As more and more pilgrims came to worship the relics the town fathers decided to build a vastly larger space to accommodate all those tourists. When you tour the church you don’t actually see many bones but you do see a lot of reliquaries that supposedly have parts of dead saints in them. Seems morbid to me, but I’m not Catholic. Over the centuries, though, it was a big deal and became an important stop on the part of the Camino de Santiago – the Way of St. James – that ran from Arles in Provence across the Pyrenees to Santiago de Campostela in Spain.

So that was Toulouse – meals with friends, touring an old church, and an afternoon in the country. And for me, sadly, limping painfully after smashing my toe on an unexpected step in the bathroom when I got up in the middle of the night. Painful, but perhaps not unexpected when you stay in strange hotels too often. Now it’s off to Cahors as we continue our trek into central France.

From Biarritz we left the Atlantic coast and headed east, making a three-night stop in Pau, the largest town in the Pyrenees. You’ve probably never heard of Pau, and I hadn’t either before planning this trip. But it was a logical stop to make as we head toward the center of France and eventually across the country to the French Alps.

Pau is a pretty town on a hill above the River Pau, at the edge of the Pyrenees. At the turn of the 20th century it was a favorite wintering spot for British and American expats, and the town today retains some of the grandeur of that time. The Boulevard des Pyrénées wraps around one edge of town, supposedly offering its strollers views of the mountains. But I didn’t see anything that looked like mountains. More like small hills at the very outer edge of what might become a mountain range.

We were originally scheduled to pick up a car in Biarritz, so that we could more easily explore the mountains here. In fact we were going to keep that car for the rest of this trip. But we canceled the car in favor of more train travel. That means we didn’t really see anything resembling a mountain at all, but it was perfectly nice to hang out in this pleasant town, get laundry and some other errands done, and enjoy some surprisingly good food.

Pau was once the capital of the Kingdom of Navarre, and it is the birthplace of king Henri III of Navarre, who would eventually become King Henri IV of France, the founder of the Bourbon dynasty. Henri would spend a lifetime navigating the wars between Catholics and Protestants. He survived numerous assassination attempts, until one Catholic zealot stabbed him to death in Paris in 1610. Henri has a strong presence here in Pau, including the castle where he was born, where you can also see the turtle shell that supposedly served as his crib.

This was a lovely stop, if not the mountain adventure we might have expected. But no worries, since we’re sure to see some REAL mountains in a couple weeks. But our next stop is Toulouse, where we look forward to meeting up some great friends from New York.