Canal du Midi

From Castelnaudary to Homps

After leaving Madrid, we flew to Toulouse, we only spent the one night and the next day we caught the train down to Castelnaudary, to pick up our boat for our trip down the Canal du Midi. The canal is 240 kms long from Toulouse all the way down to the Mediterranean, built between 1666 and 1681 using only hand tools it only stopped being used for commercial transport in the 1980’s. It is one of the most scenic canal trips in the world, meandering through rural villages of Southern France.

After our safety briefing, we were assigned to “Tango 9” which was to be our transport and home for the next week. We loaded up our rental bicycles and some provisions and off we went.

So begins the baptism of fire, as you leave the Le Boat base you are faced with three back to back locks for which the two minute handling tutorial seems a little light. We jumped onto the steep learning curve and surprised ourselves with how well we handled things straight off the bat.

The first leg of the trip is characterised by a lot of evaluation change and subsequently a lot of locks, as we left a little late on day 1 we had to spend our first night between two locks because we couldn’t make it through before closing time. Luckily it was in the beautiful countryside and we learnt that wild docking was actually the way to go, you can leave the marinas for someone else the best part is stopping in a beautiful spot in the middle of nowhere.

Day 2 was also a lot of locks and unfortunately some rain as well, once again the captain and crew held up well and we spent the night in Bram. With access to shore power which meant we could have hot showers and use the heating system to dry our wet cloths.

Day 3 started cold but clear and lead us to a beautiful town of Villesèquelande where we docked to do a supply run into town and have lunch. We strolled through the historic village and had a quick chat with the oldest elm tree in France. Stocked up with fresh provisions we pushed on. Originally we had planned to stop in city of Carcassonne but seeing the harbour full and the lock free we decided to go “just a little bit further”. This was a mistake, and after a failed docking in the center of town where we lost a mooring stake, we pushed “a little but further” to the outskirts of town for the night.

Thanks to going so far on day 3, day 4 was a short day we sailed into Trebes before midday, this allowed us to take lunch at a local waterfront cafe and mooch around town where we found a British Indian who made samosas and really good baguettes. The kids also got a more time to ride there bikes and chill out.

Day 5 took us to the sleepy village of Marseillette, not much was going on and James wasn’t feeling well so we played on the bikes, flew the drone and took in one of the most remarkable sunsets we have ever seen.

Day 6 we wild camped near to the village of Puicheric, this was our favorite stop. We were moored just after a quite little bridge, with beautiful trees and rosemary shrubs. It was a 1 km walk into the little town on the way you walk past all these little allotments where locals are growing their own produce, we managed to find some fresh veggies for dinner and returned to out little slice of paridise to enjoy a glass of wine while we cooked it.

Day 7 was Mothers Day, and while we were taking our morning coffee on the upper deck we were approached by Roberto, an elderly local, who through some very broken French we learnt was selling onions. We hopped off the boat and bought some fresh onions and potatoes from his plot next to the canal. He also gave Jo a beautiful rose, which was extremely fitting all things considered. We cooked up the potatoes with the onions for breakfast, they were delicious. Then we headed on our final stretch to the base at Homps. We pulled in relatively early and decided to take the bikes out to the local dam for a swim. Unfortunately we had two bicycle crashes, with Juliet’s being quite serious, so our last day didn’t end as well as it began. That said nothing broken only quite a lot of missing skin.

Day 8 was handover day and we had to clean and pack before setting off for the train station to catch our trains to Avignon to meet up with John and Donna. More on that in our next post.

Thank you for reading,

Lots of love,

The Grow Travel Family.