Last Friday I had to drive to Carcassonne from Thezan to collect my daughter from the airport.
Now there are two ways of getting from Thezan to this airport, either you drop down to the motorway and streak off thataway to Carcassonne.
This takes (according to Michelin) I hour and 7 minutes door to door, costs about €9 for the toll and is numbingly boring and completely stressful as you dodge and weave your way up one of the busiest motorways in France : La Langaguedocienne.
It is no consolation whatsoever that you are travelling almost exactly along the track of the ancient Via Domitienne which was built by the Romans to facilitate their conquest of Southern France and Spain and later used by Hannibal and his elephants in their assault on the empire.
Me, I prefer a more meandering route which I have established over the years. This route (again according to Michelin) takes nearly an extra thirty minutes, costs absolutely nothing in motorway tolls and is a constant and unfading delight as I drive through wonderful characterful towns and villages in the Herault and the Aude , weave my way through the beautiful, and once immensely practical, Canal de Midi, catching glimpses of the hills of Corbiers to the south and then the Pyrenees behind them and leaving the Monts d’Espinouse behind to the north as they seamlessly merge into the Montagnes Noire.

As soon as I leave the house and head towards the back routes I hit my first little visual treat.
Straight ahead of me is our neighbouring village of Murviel which sits proudly on its little hill, castle properly on the top, with a perfect background of the Monts d’Espinouse , the foothills of the Massif Central.
My next treat on this journey comes about two kilometres after I leave my door.
En Route to Cazouls I pass over the River Orb on a lovely old suspension bridge.
This bridge, like lots of bridges over the Orb, is single lane and warns, as you mount it that never are more than one heavy vehicle to be on the bridge at one time.
As you pass over it, if you go slowly enough, you get wonderful views up and down the river.
After Cazouls I take the tiny little D 16 which winds through vines and links me on the road to Puisserguier. On that road is treat number three. On the right hand side there is The Chateau with the Beautiful Roof.
I have seen roofs like this in Burgundy where they are much feted , this is a lovely concoction of shiny glazed tiles making almost Moorish patterns on the roof.
A little gem.
Then on to Puisserguier – where I have been told there are a strong contingent of Irish émigrés who have vineyards- and then back on to the D 16 and through yet more vines to wind my way to Capestang.

A word at this stage about the vines.
The grape harvest has just started here in the Languedoc and as the country here is almost exclusively devoted to viniculture this is the most important moment in the agricultural economy of the area. The harvest has precedence over all and you must always yield the little tractors with their trailers full of lusciously dripping red grapes. The forecourts around the wine co-ops in the villages are busy places at this time of year as the farmers rush their grapes in to be squeezed and turned into wine.

Several kilometres outside Capestang you see a high and strongly fortified tower rise up before, by the time you near the village , some of the rest of the building will have come into view and you realise that this is the spire of a fortified church, certainly built to deter enemies rather than to invite in the faithful.
Just as you enter Capestang is the first crossing of the canal de Midi , as you pass over the bridge into the town you will certainly see boats and barges all moored by the banks- unfortunately if you look north you will see where they have started the cull of the Plane trees which have been infected with the deadly Canker Stain fungus.
From Capstang you leave behind the narrower country roads and travel on a Route National.
Now this road passes back and forth between Herault and Aude and also weaves itself in and out of the Canal de Midi. but still the only crop you see is the vine.

After you leave (for a while) the canal near Argeliers there comes a long straight road
where for once the vine does not rule. This is the fruit garden of the area and there are hectares of fruit trees on both sides of the road. Here they grow Peaches and Apricots, Nectarines and Plums , Greengages and Quetsch and closer to the ground and earlier in the summer they also have quantities of delicious strawberries and raspberries.
They even have a farm (run by an Englishman of course) where you can Pick Your Own.

Treat number four happens as we leave this garden part of our trip. Just as we cross over the tiny river Cesse is the little jewel of a Chateau de Cabezac looking like a miniature of a Loire Chateau . It is now a hotel (I have never gone in) and in June he wears a stunning Wisteria which flows down the wall of the house right into the Cesse.

Then after a last dip into Herault we enter into l’Aude full time.
This part of the journey we are accompanied by two waterways. The Canal de Midi parallels our route to the north, we can see its sentinel and endangered trees sometimes directly at the side of the road. Here we are also joined, to the South by the river Aude which also has a guard of honour of trees at this stage as it travels eastward to join the Mediterranean at Les Cabanes de Fleury just south of Beziers.
This is flatter country here in the Aude but still dominated by vines.
The Corbiere hills are to the south of us , hiding now any glimpse of the Pyrenees, and La Montagne d’Aleric dominates to the south.
I always scan this hill as closely as driving saftly permits on the hope of spotting The Bear.
Apparently when they re-introduced bears back into the Pyrenees a few years ago one of them proved to be anti-social and headed north to Corbieres and ended up here causing great unhappiness to the few farmers who kept sheep and goats on the higher land.
I have yet to spot him.

Next town we pass through is Trebes, one that I have a particular affection for as it was here in a campsite by the River Aude that we camped for a month in the summer of 2006 while we searched the area for a house big enough to house the Chambre d’Hote of our dreams . (we found it after about three weeks but that is another story)
A most amazing thing happened in the church of Trebes just a few years ago.
There was a wedding happening and the members of the wedding had been in the church on the day before decorating it with flowers and the usual wedding tokens.
During the night a muffled whoomp was heard from the church and in the morning it was discovered that the ceiling had fallen during the night fairly destroying all the wedding decorations.
What was amazing however was what this ceiling had hidden for hundreds of years.
All of the beams of the original church were covered with carved heads from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
These appeared to be painted caricatures of all the inhabitants of the town; the merchants and their wives and the tailor and possibly even the candlestick maker.
There is certainly a Moorish gentleman complete with an appropriate hat and even one woman who people in the know claim was a lady who worked evenings.
Some puritanical priest had decided they were inappropriate and they had been covered over several hundred years before and completely forgotten until they narrowly missed making a disaster out of a wedding.

That is certainly (if there is a moment to stop and look at it ) treat number five.

We are now extremely close to Carcassonne but we have still one treat to look forward to.
As you enter the city turn to the left on the road to Limoges which leads you to the airport, this climbs up the road to the south of the cite and there you get the very best view of Violet le Duc’s triumph/ folly ; The walled Cite of Carcassonne.
I promise you it will take your breath away.
Whether its intact walls or it’s wonderful conical turreted towers were a figment of Le Duc’s imagination or an accurate rebuilding of what was destroyed this world heritage site is stunning.

Then its just a case of dropping down to the airport with a little sigh of appreciation of the beauties of our adopted country.