On our last full day, we had a bit of a plan to make sure Marie-Laure experienced the freewheeling turn-up-at-an-amazing-restaurant-in-the-middle-of-nowhere Canal du Midi signature lunch. I’d checked out there were a couple of places after Villeneuve-les-Beziers that looked suitable. Reality had other ideas.
One thing to note: if we’d done this again, we would have skipped Béziers and moored at Villeneuve instead. One lock further on, and a pretty little place with butcher and baker nearby. No sign of a Centre Commercial! Oh, and an osteopath – the villages along the Canal du Midi seem to be very well provisioned with osteopaths. Ironically, my back has been happier than it normally is in strange beds – the firmness of the cabin berths suits me very well.
Anyway, the first restaurant was not very open (we were a bit early), didn’t look very wonderful and was right next to a busy main road. The second, “Les Gambilles”, had been the real plan (and Google Maps said it was open) but it was clearly in the process of pre-season refurbishment. A hasty check of the book and Google Maps later and the revised plan was for Mon rêve d’enfant in the village of Portiragnes. What a great outcome that was!
Easy mooring just before the last lock of the journey, then 15 minutes walk to the centre of this very pretty little village, which also features a cutting-edge mairie and salle polyvalente. The restaurant is in an idyllic setting and run by an Anglo-French couple. The service and ambience were perfect and the food was just perfection itself. Foie gras, a great salade chèvre chaud and lardons, scallops, ice cream parfait, the rosé osé – all was excellent.
We carried on congratulating ourselves on our good fortune all the way back to the boat, through the lock and finally to Port Cassafières.
Port Cassafières is suddenly a morass of Le Boat boats, centred around a small basin where tons of boats are moored up. There’s a feel of a western frontier town – a bit lawless as no-one seems to be in charge, and there’s even a one-horse type saloon place who’ll sell you a bottle of good rosé for 15 euros and a better one for 19. Fortunately, the taxi service “All’Taxis” is excellent, turned up smartish and whisked me to Béziers airport to get the hire car. A slight hiccup when it appeared the airport was closed (it’s a small airport – it looks more like an aero club than a commercial venture) but no, the Europcar desk was open and ready to hand over our car complete with child seats (and then immediately exit the building, keen to go home). I returned to the base where we celebrated the end of a cracking trip with the aforementioned rosé osé and all the rillettes, bread, cornichons and other leftovers we could handle.
Skip to this morning and we managed to hand the boat back around 9.20am and no-one seemed to mind. They clearly have bigger issues as when we went to formally check out and complain a bit about the crappy bikes, crappy barbecue and lacking hot water in one bathroom, we basically had to queue to speak to the manager. At one point the reception staff retreated into a back office as an Italian guy was starting to lose his shit about some problem (we didn’t hear what it was, but he indicated they’d been waiting one day for resolution and no-one was currently working on it) which was not being resolved. Then there was a couple who’d had no hot water for 3 days and had engine troubles too. So our issues paled in comparison, but still, you drop a chunk of wedge on a holiday, you’d like to think any issues, even slight ones, would be met with an “oh, I’m sorry to hear that, I’ll make a note of it and refund €X” as you’d expect in a good restaurant, for example, instead of the “please fill out and return this customer questionnaire”. This obviously depends on the calculus being weighted towards repeat bookings and word of mouth recommendations, rather than towards relying on new suckers to rock up fresh from a Google search with more money than sense.
So, boat bid goodbye to, we headed to our next stop of Sommières via Sète.
This was a pleasant drive, marred somewhat by the usual Russian Roulette of car sickness (and we rolled a six this time too). Sommières is where Aurélie’s godmother lives and where we’ll be looked after very well like the landlubbers we are for a couple of days. (and yes, that’s a lemon tree in the garden!)
Timsformational 