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| Carcassone |
Mid-afternoon we arrived in the medieval fortress city of Carcasonne. Our hotel, a fifteen-minute walk outside the
old, double-walled cité, was a walkup
with lumpy, rolling, funhouse floors, but it was clean, cheap, and well-located,
and the owners were congenial, offering us one of their 2 free parking
spaces. Crossing L’Aude on the Pont Vieux
we could see the massive crenellated walls stretching out to the right and left
and imagine knights jousting before them.
It’s wonderful how, in Europe, you can
travel in time as well as in space. The
vista mixed the romance of Sleeping Beauty castles with a reminder of how
brutal life once was. The rest of the day
we wandered the streets and battlements, buying tee shirts for friends and a
leather handbag for Frieda. After dark,
spooky torch-like lighting gave the place an eerie atmosphere, towering walls
loomed out of black shadows. We had a cassoulet
for dinner, the local specialty, and then got lost trying to find our way out, stumbling
into half-playful moments of trepidation as we imagined some knave or varlet lurking
in the opaque shadows between the splashes of yellow light.
It was a bright blue morning as we set off toward Perpignon,
eventually exiting the toll highway at La Boubou and making our way on 2-lane
roads through rolling vineyards toward Collioure, a resort on the coast once a
hangout of the Fauve artists. From
there, we drove south. The scenery was stunning
but I had to keep my eyes on the narrow, twisty road. Frieda was navigating and told me to stop in Banyuls
Sur Mer, a seaside town about 10k. north of the Spanish border, where we had
crepes at a place on the beach.
A couple hours later we pulled into Cadaqués, a whitewashed
town built into jagged black rocks and surrounded by mountains that, for me,
carries a flavor of Greece. I first visited it, briefly, in 1998 when
Frieda, whose parents were born in Spain, was giving me the Grand
Tour. Her father was from Figueres, a town about 35k.
inland that was also the birthplace of Dalí.
Her grandfather was Dalí’s drawing teacher, and her father and Dalí were
childhood chums. Much later, when she
was a child, her family visited and Dalí, who was living in Cadaqués at the
time, (or, more precisely, in Port Lligat, a kilometer away) sent a car to
bring them to his house. She still
remembers how frightened she was by the huge (to an 8-year-old) stuffed bear looming
just inside the front door, and her unease about the very odd man who was giving
her a tour of his unusual home. We returned
in 2000 for a longer visit, exploring Dalí’s museum in Figueres (the definitive
Dalí experience), as well as Gala’s Castle in Pubol. We stayed in Cadaqués for 2 weeks on that
trip, also exploring the little towns south to Tossa de Mar. We even toyed with the idea of buying a pied-à-terre there. Spain was still on the peseta then and
everything was cheap. But in the end we
decided against it because we would’ve felt obligated to return every year and
there were too many other places we wanted to go. So instead we picked up a print of Dalí’s 1924
painting of a beach in Cadaqués, “Port Alguer,” and put it over our
mantle.
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| Port Alguer, 1924 |
We soon discovered that, aside from a
favorite gelateria, everything we remembered was still there. In
those days we had stayed at Playa Sol, and every morning after
breakfast had gone for a swim from the little beach right in front of
it. After drying in the sun, we’d walk down to the main town beach
for beer and anchovy-stuffed olives and some chatting and people
watching. When the olives couldn’t stave off hunger any longer,
we’d walk back along the shore to our favorite restaurant, Ix!, for
some paella, mussels in red sauce, or some other delectable
comestible, before returning to the hotel for siesta. Toward evening
we’d go for a stroll around town, maybe pausing for espressos,
eventually stopping somewhere for tapas. All our favored
haunts were still there. The only difference was more people; the
town didn’t seem as laid back and sleepy as it once was. This
impression was reinforced at a tapas place near the main beach where
the road in front of the outdoor patio, unlike the old days, now
swarmed with people. I tried the delicious navajas, a long,
narrow clam, for the first time, and we also had some old favorites,
like pimientos del patron, sardines, and bacala
fritters.
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| Port Alguer, 2013 |
In the morning we picked up our old routine, heading for the
beach nearest our hotel, which happened to be Port Alguer. The beaches in Cadaqués are dark and pebbly,
and the water is a dark, emerald green, but clear. At first cold, it soon felt refreshing, and I
was thrilled to swim in the Mediterranean again, a sea so full of history, the
sea of Homer and Odysseus, the birthplace, cradle, and playpen of Western
Civilization. We dried in the sun before
heading to the main beach for beer and olives, and on to Ix!. The next day we varied the routine with a
stroll over to Dali’s house after lunch.
It was closed so we couldn’t retour it, but the enchanted walk through
the olive groves charmed us and reminded me again of Greece. After siesta I bought Frieda a black leather
vest.
The following morning we took off for Barcelona via the main highway. Frieda did an amazing job of navigating, better
than a GPS, weaving through the city to our hotel at the top of La Rambla without a hitch. I parked in a red zone while she registered
and sent the bellhop out to take our luggage, and then she directed me to the
Avis office near the Avenida Diagonal through
a bewilderment of one-way streets. We
pulled into their garage at 12:59 and they slammed the door behind us for
siesta. From there we walked down Paseo de
Gracia toward our hotel. I marched past
Casa Milá, but it jumped out of my
peripheral vision. That and Casa Batlló,
a little farther along, are hard to miss, they’re both so startlingly
unique. We’d toured the first and seen
the other Gaudí sights in 2000, when we were in Barcelona for nearly a week. At the hotel we sampled the 24-hour buffet,
taking the booty up to our room to eat on the balcony over La Rambla and watch
the hordes of people swarming for Fiesta
de la Merce.
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| Cadaqués |
We’d already noticed that people on La Rambla looked shabbier
than they had on our last visit and on the way to dinner at Els Quatre Gats we noted homeless folk
sleeping on door sills. These were the
first symptoms of the recession we’d seen; we hadn’t noticed it in Basque
country. Our waiter at the restaurant,
who was Chilean, told us Spain
hadn’t lived up to his hopes and he was thinking of going home. Nevertheless, the restaurant, not cheap, was
jammed, with no vacant tables.
In the dim morning light we caught a bus at La Plaza de
Catalunya and watched Barcelona
slowly unpeel from its windows as it shuttled us out to Terminal 1. It was hard to believe that in about 18 hours
we would be 6,000 miles away and these buildings, these streets, indeed all
that we had seen on this trip, would be just a dream.
