Cordes-sur-Ciel, a city in the sky (12 Sept, 2008)

Last September I made a pilgrimage, so to speak, to Mont Saint-Michel, a UNESCO World Heritage site which loomed large on my Life To-Do list. It is the most-visited abbey (3 hours west of Paris) and sits majestically on a rock, surrounded by volatile and impenetrable tides, at the border of Normandy and Brittany. David, his sister Jan, her husband Richard and I spent a night on the Mont, feeling as if we were the only people in this Medieval time warp.

Cordes-sur-Ciel, near Albi, is also a popular tourist site and evokes a similar sense of time/space discontinuum, but it is much larger, more of an actual living city and extremely well preserved. The cobblestone streets snake steeply up the hillsides, lined with luxurious 14th and 15th century homes decorated with sculptures and other architectural details. There are façades and remnants that date from the 13th century when the fortified village was founded by the Count of Toulouse in 1222 to protect the Cathars.

I did not get the "whole story" on the Cathars, but apparently they represented strong opposition to the corruption of the Catholic Church. Priests and Bishops were getting married, pilfering riches and otherwise undermining confidence of the people who decided to form a grassroots movement and demand adherence to the faith. They were, of course, condemned by the pope and sought out and destroyed in a crusade which began in 1209. There are numerous churches, ruins and museums that attest to the Cathars' resistance efforts.

Cordes-sur-Ceil was considered an alchemist's stronghold. I wish I had time to explore the remnants of them. Today it boasts a high concentration of craftspeople in glass, wood, canvas art, sculpture, fabric, ceramics and so on. The feel of the place was magical and the two hotels we previewed would be delightful to visit, overlooking the pastoral valleys and the ancient stone spires.

Roquefort -- a Cheesy Place

Since 1863, Société has been making its smelly, moldy cheese in caves in the mountain town of Roquefort. Around that time, tunnels were discovered with a chartreuse-green mold, a form of penecillium, which is now cultivated in the caves. Mixed with goat milk, from a special local breed of ewes, the cheese "blooms" and is made into rounds by hard-working women and then placed on end, on wooden tables, and left to ripen for months under the supervision of "master ripeners."

There are seven producers in Roquefort but Société seems to be the largest, exporting about 25% of its production and making a name for itself on the tourism circuit. As the growing season is January to June, the factory was empty and in the places of thousands of rounds of cheese were plastic imitations, The dioramas and displays date from an earlier, pre-tech period and are, in a word, cheesy.

Millau - Gloves, Bridge, Friends, 10 Sept. 2008

Millau (pronounced "Me-oo") is a small city in industrial decline and yet, thanks to our extraordinary tour guide, Hubertus Richard, it was among the most interesting stops. Its only remaining manufacturing company is Causse, which makes some 25,000 pair a year of very fine and very expensive gloves, keeping alive this elegant craft (gants de peau) since 1892.

But, recently, Millau put itself on the map with the construction of a viaduct designed by Sir Norman Foster. Considered the highest suspension bridge in the world (343 meters from the base to the top), its 7 elegant harp-like posts create a stunning profile against the stark landscape and span the Gorge du Tarn, shaving several hours off a road trip from the north of France to Bizet on the Mediterranean coast.

It is a privately-funded project, with the agreement or projection of recouping its investment within 75 years. However, returns coming from a single toll now look like the project will be paid for in a mere 20 years. A good bet. It took exactly 3 years to construct.

These facts and many stories and philosophical musing were presented by an energetic Dutch character who moved to Millau 25 years ago and embraced the city as his own. With intense energy, reminescent of Italian director Roberto Benini, Hubertus joined our group for dinner and then my new friends -- Wendi from LA,, David from Louisville, KY and our amiable tour bus driver, Pascal -- and I continued a late-night walking tour of Millau's extensive and mysterious old town with Hubertus.

Among its interesting stories was the fact that Millau shared history, culture and language for 150 years with Catalunya, due to a marriage of a Catalunyan daughter to the Count of Millau in the 12th century, and the city coat of arms still bears the colors and images of Catalunya. Exploring the winding, deserted streets in the wee hours, hearing tales of people who lived here, died there, gave the sense of walking through history and feeling both the connection to and disconnection from the centuries of human experience.

Conques and powerful relics

OK, times were tough in the Middle Ages. People desperately needed something to believe in and had no choice but to believe in whatever the Roman Catholic Church was serving up...sometimes one's own head for opposing it. But whenever there is no-choice, there are people who want something different.

An opposition group to The Church sprang up and those who fought them, in the name of The Church, became martyrs. Such was the case in the story of a girl who, at 13 years old, was beheaded for her faith and became celebrated as Sainte Foy (Saint Faith, Santa Fe -- Holy Faith). The gold statue of her sitting on a throne dates back to the 9th Century and was added to over the years -- embedded rock crystal from the German empire, earrings from the 13th century, her face replaced from a previous Roman statue, her shoes remade in the 19th century. Now, with more than 1,000 years of decoration, this statue (maybe 3-feet tall), is the only one of its kind and has engendered more than 1,000 years of devotion and mythology.

It resides in a chapel in Conques, a charming village of silver-gray slate roofs, steep winding cobblestone streets and brown stone walls, nestled into the side of a hill in a remote part of Aveyron. The town is a major stop on the way to Compestela and is famous not only for the statue of the young martyr and many other bejeweled vessels that hold pieces of the cross and body bits from saints, but for its abbey church of Sainte-Foy.

This church is a landmark of Romanesque architecture -- soaring stone pillars and arches -- and an elaborate carving on the tympanum (over the front door) of the Last Judgement. Amid all the images of eternal suffering (which look like "regular living" at the time), there are some interesting and whimsical faces which are called "The Curious Ones." Perhaps the sculptor had an unusual sense of humor or incredible optimism about the after-life. Perhaps he was beheaded for heresy, these being the only light-hearted images amid the serious business of eternal life. The abbey is also famous for stained-glass windows by contemporary painter Pierre Soulages. Some half-million tourists and pilgrims visit Conque each year.

Images from Cahours in the Lot Valley

In the course of six intensive days, a group of 12 American travel agents, as guests of Maison de la France, visited a number of France's designated "beautiful villages" in the Midi-Pyrenees area north of Toulouse. These few photos of our first stop in Cahours (pronounced, roughly, as "cow-oos") do not do justice to the stunning beauty of this 10th century Medieval city built on the banks of the Lot River.

As I sent home (via a kind colleague) all the brochures I collected from this trip, I will not attempt to provide details beyond what my overloaded brain can recall, but I will post more photos (each blog allows only 5 photos) and, hopefully, fill in the details in the future. Needless to say, this is an area of France mostly unknown to U.S. travelers and definitely worth exploring for both its natural beauty and historic value.

AIRBUS & CONCORDE, Sept. 8, 2008

Yesterday (was it only yesterday?) we spent the morning at the Airbus facility outside Toulouse, which employs 4,000 workers in 3 shifts round-the clock, and 56,000 workers in the cooperative production effort between France, Germany, UK and Spain which was made possible by the UK-France collaboration on the Concorde back in the 1970s.

The scope of the projects are staggering, and the ingenuity mind-boggling. For example, there are numerous structures that cover 10 hectres each (the size of 300 tennis courts, if you can imagine that). One of the buildings has more steel -- seen as exterior skeletal supports -- than the Eiffel Tower, an onsite energy plant, underground fuel lines to more efficiently fuel up the A380 with its 310,000 litre capacity which is considered "green" because it uses only 2.9 litres of fuel per passenger per 100 km flown compared to the industry average of 3.3 litres and the Concorde which used 15 litres.

Various parts are manufactured in the different countries' 16 plants and shipped to Toulouse for assembly. In order to move some of the huge parts from the French port to the inland plant, an elaborate multi-modal transport system had to be designed along with special trucks with side lasers to guide them through narrow French town streets. That one trip takes 3 nights.

Then 23,500 rivets are hand installed to attach the fusilage and wings to the oval-shaped body. The engines, ordered by the customers (airlines or sheiks) are made by Mercedes Benz or Engine Alliance (GE) and account for a third of the roughly $300 million U.S. price tag. After the planes are put together, they're shipped to Hamburg for painting with 2 tons of talcum-laden paint. With a goal of 450 deliveries per year in 2010, up from 275 in 2007, it seems like investing in talcum could be a good bet. You read it here first.

The security at this place was extensive – barbed wire fences, giving up our cameras and, normally at such site, relinquishing our passport; but because we were with Maison de la France we were allowed entrance into the gift shop where we were held prisoners for nearly an hour, and many succumbed to purchasing TV and keychains.

After all the data (I spared you some details) and shuttled around by a guide who is German but speaks English with a French accent, we were taken to the site of the first test Concorde, a small, narrow plane boasting 60’s orange decor. Only 24 were ever made (including 4 test planes) to fly beyond the speed of sound at 18,000 meters into the stratosphere carrying 100 passengers who, for about 8000 euros each, were able to buy themselves a few more hours in Paris or New York and see two sunrises in 3-1/2 hours.

After the accident at CDG (Paris), wherein the rear tires exploded and punctured the fuel tank in the wing, Concorde stopped flying in 2003. It was not economically fesible…not to mention it made a deafening noise, polluted terribly and required one crewmember to open valves en route and siphon 10 tons of kerosene from one chamber to another to stablize the plane on takeoffs and landings.

However, it did provide some breakthroughs, like cooperation between European nations (UK and France) and technical advances like electronic control systems, telon, ABS breaks and carbon fibers.

For me, it was one of those experiences that is more interesting in retrospect than it was at the time.