Albi Travel Articles & Travelogues

FRANCE TRAVEL ARTICLES

ALBI September 2003

Albi was one of the places we had particularly wanted to visit. We booked in at Hotel Cantepau, which was in a good position not far from the city centre. We walked across the bridge into the centre at about 3.30pm and went straight to the Toulouse-Lautrec museum. It was well worth a visit and contained a superb collection of posters, paintings, lithographs, plates and drawings. Most of the original drawings and paintings of the famous posters were there. Most of these were oil on cardboard. We both enjoyed the exhibition and the additional bonus of beautiful views over the river and gardens from the old palace where the collection is housed.

Albi cathedral is a huge, rather ugly, Gothic pile. It impresses because of its enormous size and is a curious mixture of brick and stone. Some of the external stone tracery was lovely but I found the internal décor fairly hideous. We didn’t go into the choir; we weren’t tempted after seeing the rest of the place. It was a very hot and sticky afternoon appeared to be threatening to rain, so we went into a bar for a beer. Albi is a very attractive city, on both sides of the river, and has lots of lovely medieval buildings. We took a few photographs from both sides of the river.

When we returned to the hotel, I rang Brenda. My mother was there, so I was able to wish her a happy birthday. She seemed quite bright and sounded as though she was enjoying herself.

It was still very warms when we went out again at about 8.15pm. We went to Auberge du Pont Vieux, a restaurant close to the river. There was a party on the ground floor and we were shown down into the cellar. It was really old with a flagged floor, arched ceiling and brickwork walls. We guessed that the proprietor was French, his wife Thai and that the two attractive waitresses were their daughters. Of course, we might have been entirely wrong!

We both decided on the 19.50€ menu. After having a glass of kir, we had assiette – salad leaves, smoked duck, processed meats, blue cheese, walnuts and tomatoes in a nice dressing. There was good crusty bread and a carafe of water already on the table. Norman had cassoulet of duck and I had stuffed thigh of duck in a mushroom sauce served with dauphinoise potatoes and green beans. For dessert, Norman had raspberry and lemon sorbets and I had crème caramel. We both had a very good cup of coffee. It was very good plain cooking at a total cost of 49.60€. Yet another good meal!