ADVENTURES, CHALLENGES, AND INSIGHTS OF A COUPLE IN EARLY RETIREMENT
We have been looking forward to visiting Carcassonne, on our roving retirement journey, since we were in France in 2020. Both Diana and I had visited many years ago and we only remembered the climb up the hill, the “fairy tail” walls, and the cassoulet. This time we chose to stay inside the city walls of Carcassonne, to maximize our time in situ.
Our main reason for heading into France was to attend our visa appointment at the Prefecture in Nice. That said, we lived in Nice for more than two months last year and we were anxious to visit some of our old haunts. We toyed with the idea of staying in and exploring another part of town but finally settled on staying in roughly the same neighborhood as we did before.
For years, people have talked to us about going to San Sebastián Spain to eat. That is because there are more Michelin stars per capita in San Sebastián, a town of 200,000 people, than any other place on earth. We decided to visit San Sebastián, the foodie mecca, even though it was a 7-hour drive from Santiago de Compostela.
After our stay in Porto, we felt compelled, COMPELLED!, to head up the Douro River to seek out the sources of all of the port wine we saw being aged in the warehouses in Gaia. We were not disappointed by the visit, neither by the Port, we tasted, nor the stunning views the Douro Valley affords.
We left some extra time in our schedule on our roving retirement tour of the Iberian peninsula. Neither of us had been to Galicia and our research told us that we should definitely visit Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia.
