Today was a long day. We left the apartment a bit before 8 for the train station since it takes almost half an hour to get there and Jacques had a question to ask at the desk. We decided to go to Albi today. We ended up waiting almost an hour for the train to Albi. If we had chosen Carcassonne, we would have been able to make the train that was leaving 10 minutes after we arrived, but we dawdled too long before making up our mind. The trip to Aldi was a little over an hour. As soon as we arrived, we headed outside of the city center to do some lab caches that took us to Parc Rochegude. It had lots of flowers, a couple of water cascades and many sculptures that our caching took us to see.
After doing these caches we headed back towards city center which was a couple of kms away. On the way we did a few more caches at different monuments. We finally arrived in the historic center where the Sainte Cecile cathedral is. It was built in a southern gothic style and took over 200 years to built from 1282 to 1493. Its steeple rises to a height of 78 meters. It’s breath taking when you enter and see the opulence. It’s reminiscent of the churches at the Vatican. I’ve rarely seen a cathedral that was so beautiful inside. It would be very distracting to pray in such surroundings. Yet despite all that luxury, we saw many homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks. The marble columns had a reddish tinge but almost everything else was in blue and green tones.
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After visiting the cathedral, our caching took us to the collegiate church of saint Salvi and its cloister. It is the oldest religious building in the city. There was a cache in the cloisters which we would not have visited because it was behind a door that we would not have known to look for if not for our geocaching.
Then we saw la maison du vieil Albi, a typical medieval house that is built of half brick and half timber. There were numerous small courtyards with wells. Next on the list was ‘’ Le Palais de la Berbie’’ and its garden. We passed in front of the Toulouse Lautrec museum but opted not to go in. We just had a look at the courtyard and then continued. We could see a path down below that followed the Tarn river, after numerous wrong paths and many steps, we finally found the right path to the river.
We didn’t walk far before turning around to go find the way to access the bridge that we wanted to cross because the lady at the tourist bureau had told us that the view of Albi from the other side of the river was nice. She was not wrong. We walked on that side of the river until we reached another bridge. We crossed it and then cached our way back to where the cathedral is. On the way we saw the covered market, la maison Enjalbert, l’hotel Reynès built in the 16th century and le pont neuf which is their oldest bridge contrary to its name.
We had planned on taking a coffee break near the train station before coming back to the apartment but when we arrived, we saw that there was a train leaving in 7 minutes so no coffee break for us. We would have had to wait an hour for the next train, so we hopped on this one. These 10 euros a day tickets are great because you can just on any Lio train without reservations.
Back at the apartment it was time to relax after a 16 km day. Our apartment has a nice patio, so we sat outside for an hour or so.
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