We have found the most delightful camping... basically its someones front garden passing as a basic campsite. Nailloux Lauragais. Theres apparently room for 6 vans but to be honest I,m not sure how.
We found a market but nothing grabbed us...
There were just 2 vans the first night and then just us. The hosts were incredibly friendly giving us freshly picked figs and muscat grapes from the garden and making us very welcome with a shaded picnic table and chairs.
They were very helpful about how to get the bus in Toulouse and so we made a plan to do that for the next day.... as the bus was at 8am we decided to explore the village to determine where the bus stop was.
Its a very pretty place, mostly quite old village - lots of tiny red bricks and interesting rooves.
The usual ornate church with bells that ring every half hour and not a lot else. The bus stop was exactly where our host said it was so all was good.
Up with the rather lovely orange tailed wee birds playing in the bird bath... out for a bus into Toulouse. Very simple until we needed metro from 'bus station' but it was closed for construction work... it took a while to work it out and them more time to find(wrong) replacement bus into the centre ville... sorted eventually and we rewarded ourselves with a long walk - (result of wrong bus) and a very nice coffee....
Toulouse is pretty, its very clean and full of eclectic buildings.
We wandered through the old quarrter to the tourist info and picked some seriously unhelpful advice and a good map. We carried on wandering - I took photos but not entirely sure of what 😀
It got quite warm... our plan was to explore town in the morning and spend the heat of the day at the art gallwry and then the Halle de la Machines - a museum/building dedicated to automatom giant puppets - the thing the french are really good at. As the heat intensified we checked out thegallery - closed on wednesdays! So of we went looking for the Hallede la Machines...
It took some finding... its on the town outskirts - we needed a bus - we chatted to a very helpful young woman who told us the buses and the metro changed daily almost on a whim..a clear explanation why we couldnt find the bus that tourist info had instructed us to get- it had ceased to operate. We walked a long way round in circles and finally more by luck than managment found a bus that would takeus near our intended destination!
The Halle de la Machine did not disappoint. The gigantic minotaur was amazing. Get an idea of scale by spotting the people riding on it and the puppeteers working it.
It had been adapted to take passengers and I was very sad all the space were taken - It took off down the large allocated space and I (and several others)charged after it around the cicuit taking photos
And even got 'snotted' on when he sprayed wate from his nose and mourh. He was SPLENDID.
The giant spider was outoside as well but didn't actually rise... still pretty impressive though.
Having chased the minotaur about we decided to have a very nice lunch in the cafe before we explored the rest of the museum. Picture below is a photo of photo in the cafe showing the giant mechanical minotaur without passengers walking through Toulouse.
The museum was full of interesting and varied experimental musical instruments
and plant feeding bio diversity experiments... hard to explain
and to be honest not very clear until we had watched some short films upstairs. The films went some way to explaining some of the rational behind the huge plant project but more interestingly (to me)showed a couple of fabulous films about 'Lilith' a femme scorpion.... self proclaimed to be quite fierce... 'Je suis Lilith' a creature superior to all creatures... with eyes the colour of water and no morals....
I would have loved to see her in the flesh so to speak but she was out on tour.
Meanwhile back in the big hall there was a lunch being served to 2 long tables of diners.
I' m not sure what it was called but something like ' dinner with the mechanics". It was hilarious. All the food was being served by "robotic" (but real) waiters using various ridiculous but very inventive machines. It looked like great fun. We only caught bits of it in passing but the drinks were poured using a very complicated weird machine...
the main course came on a self righting wheel pushed round the table and the bread buns distributed by an "arm catapault"...sometimes from half wayup the stairs.
The pepper grinder was engineered by a waiter pushing a 'bicycle' with a chap hand operating a mechanism to elevate and rotate a young woman into the air suspended over the table and grind pepper onto the dish.....
It was a great afternoon and in order not to ruin it by once again not finding relevant transport... we just got an uber to the bus station so managed to miss out on faffing about looking for elusive buses...
Back to camp.. very very hot - cold beer and eventually some crazy right on top of us thunder storms. The van kept lighting up like some horror show and then shaking as thunder rolled across the roof..... very exciting. This went on for hours - did at least cool the van down a bit.
We opted to stay a third night at the camping... we needed a complete rest day and we were fortunate the weather cooled a little... so very late start..more thunder and just total relaxed afternoon...sat stitching and reading in the garden before getting ready for the next leg.
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