Carcassonne to Olonzac

Tuesday 9th November Carcassonne to Olonzac The canal route improved a bit in so far as it was now dry but the roots and the leaves are still a formidable hazard. Getting out of Carcassonne was fairly easy and we soon stormed into Puicheric where originally we had thought we’d spend the night. Other than seeing Kingfishers, Egrets and hundreds of ducks biking along the canal is getting a bit dull. We still get excited by Red Squirels but are beginning to realize that they are very common here. You can’t see over the banks a lot of the time and if you do look for too long at any view there is a danger you will go off the track or hit a root. As it was only 3’ish at Puicheric, we decided to push on for Homps, a place the guide books told us had 2 B&B’s and a hotel. Homps it turns out has all of these but they were closed for the winter, but someone kindly informed us that at Olonzac there are plenty of B&Bs and hotels. So off we went again a little concerned by now as cars are starting to use headlights and dusk is approaching. Olonzac is an unprepossessing sort of place but on entering the village there was a bar cum hotel so we dived in and Alec made probably the biggest mistake of his life by accepting a room which had no curtains (but it did have shutters) and a (really skanky) shower – we couldn’t have a room with a bath because it would have been too noisy. Now we should have asked ‘why’ but we are still new to this game and it wasn’t until we had paid for the room up front that we learned that tonight the bar had an evening of three heavy metal bands playing, starting at 9.30pm and going on until possibly 2am but we were assured by our congenial fag smoking host, not later than 3am. There was a certain amount of discussion about moving elsewhere to a B&B of which there were many but we’d been taken in by the first siren’s call so missed them all. We dallied as long as possible in a pizzeria which did an exceptionally good veal escalope, salads etc and returned as the bands were just warming up at about 10.30pm. Heavy metal would not have been our first choice in music and it was spectacularly noisy with audience participation in the form of shrieks, grunts and other Neanderthal sounds. Fortunately they packed it in at about 12.30 so it could have been worse.