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Published: October 8th 2006
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chillin at the holiday inn
this is the place where we finally found a room Barcelona definitely got a lot better after that last post was written. We found a better place to stay on priceline and ended up in a great room out of the main tourist part of town, for almost the same price as we were paying for both of us at the hostel… almost but not quite. Anyway we landed in better eating places, relaxed more - having our own room, this was possible - and wandered aimlessly less. But for some reason we didn’t manage to think about the future at all. We weren’t sure if we were going to go spend time in the mountains or head directly for Toulouse (near where we needed to meet up with Masa’s parents on September 23). We didn’t make train reservations, let alone hotel reservations. I guess we figured we would wing it like we had been doing the whole time.
Right. So we arrived on the morning of September 19th at the train station in Barcelona around 12 noon after leisurely checking out of the hotel and making our way over there. The next train to Toulouse (or combination of trains) left at around 4:30 in the afternoon and arrived in
Uh-oh
first thing we see after feeling ever so relieved at having a place to sleep... Toulouse around 9:20pm. Nice, add to that the tickets were a lot more expensive than we’d anticipated. Turns out had we arrived an hour or two early we’d have been able to get a much cheaper and more direct route through the Pyrenees rather than going up the Mediterranean to Narbonne and back to Toulouse. Whatever. Anyway while we were waiting around in the Barcelona train station we started looking for a hotel in Toulouse. Ha. Turns out we were a little late in the game. Every single place we called was booked full. But then these were all in the tour books so we figured maybe we’d have better luck on the ground. We got there like I said, around 9:30 or so and I sat in the station with our stuff while masa diligently went looking for a room among the numerous hotels near the train station. Not. A. One. Seriously. Then one of the hotels gave us a map with a whole bunch of hotels that are affiliated or something, but a lot of them. Alllll of them were booked full. Finally, beginning to panic as the station got creepier and creepier, masa went to the gift
Toulouse
Toulouse is a cool town, very pretty and with a large young population thanks to all the universities. Too bad it didn't have room for us! shop just before it closed, flipped open the Toulouse guide to the most expensive section and just started calling, hoping that budget places book up first. We finally found a room for 139 Euros… needless to say a bit out of our budget range but not as bad as it could’ve been and we were certainly glad to have a place to sleep.
We got to the Holiday Inn Toulouse Center, where the very nice man at the desk informed us that since Toulouse is the headquarters for Airbus and many other aerospace and other firms, it is usually booked solid during the week and rates drop on the weekends… and here we thought a Tuesday night would be a good night for finding a room. Relieved and thrilled at such a nice place to sleep, we flipped on our English language bbc news to read the caption: “Thailand Crisis”. Holy Hell. Thailand had just overthrown its government as you all know. Unsettled and more than a little perturbed, we went to sleep.
Next day 20 September, we looked around a bit for a place to stay in Toulouse but, as we had figured, it was “complet” (this
Villefranche de Lauragais
this place was pretty much a ghost town. There are a couple of people out, I know, that's because it's a saturday. is fast becoming our least favorite French word.) So we decided to head to the country side to spend a few days in a small tiny town where we were to meet up with the Alkires. Far from being quaint, Villefrance de Lauragais was somewhat backwater and boring. During the afternoon the whole town shut down (indeed most of the south of france, it turns out shuts down in the afternoon and you’re basically on your own) and the weather sucked, it was really super windy the 21st and raining all day the 22nd and 23rd. But we ran and ate some decent pizzas and holed up in our room and watched the weather out the window. It was nice to take a break for a couple days and read and catch up on our written journals etc.
On the 23rd we met up with the Alkires. That’s for another entry.
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