We left at 10am to head from Toulouse to Montpellier, via Carcassonne, the medieval city with a giant fortress. We got to Carassonne in just over 1 hour and man, 'La Cité' was so grand, like we had literally stepped back into medieval times! There was the main fortress with a web of little streets surrounding it, very very cute place! People were dressed up in medieval dress, stores were selling medieval knick knacks, had some wonderful lavender and nougat 'ar...

We picked up the rental car from the Biarritz train station National/Citer car rental company at 10:30. It was a cute and pretty much brand new Citroën C3, with the option to switch between manual and automatic transmission. First off, driving on the other (wrong) side of the road wasn't as bad as I thought it could be, although I did veer too much to the right at the beginning. Secondly, we got a little lost making our 2km trip back to the Inter Amarys Biarr...

We arrived in Biarritz, France, having caught the 11:15am train from Biarritz, switching at Hendaye for the French train to Biarritz. Got to our hotel at 1 in the arvo, dropped off our bags then got the bus to the Biarritz centre ville, meeting a super nice old French coach driver who taught us how to catch the bus. Biarritz was quite similar to San Sebastian, with a very long coastline of good surfing beaches (lots of sand). We spent the afternoon shopping and...

Day 8: Scheduled 7:20am departure... But everyone was waiting for Davo to get the bus to the hostel. Actual departure: 8am. Grrrrr great start to the day. We arrive at a French perfumery at 5pm where they showed us the process for mixing perfumes and perfumed soaps. Then we tried on about 10 different types of parfum scents. I got 4x 15mL parfum bottles: 2x Fragonard, 1x Etoile and 1x Éclat for €76 (€19 each). It all smelt very lovely! Then onto the Hotel...

8am scheduled departure. Got delayed by 2 guys on the bus having got spoken to re a fight they had last night. The plan was to follow the other tour bus who were also going to Avignon... But we (of course) had issues... Blocked oil filter affecting the throttle. {WTF moment #1}. Actual departure: 8:45am. ETA: 4:30pm (my guess: 6:30pm). Another long long bus ride today. Not sure whether my butt can take it anymore! ...and it's only day #5! haha.. What's worse....