This morning we woke up and slowly got out of bed. We ate a small breakfast (that is small in size but always seems to fill me up), said our goodbyes to Toby (who didn't want to talk to me-he hid behind the desk), and got back out on the road. This time I did not want to work. I wanted to watch. I wanted to get lost in thought. I wanted to relax and enjoy the last bit of France that I could see. Since I did have a few things I needed to do I decided I'd get started on work after 10:30. I was true to my internal word. I got to work shortly after 10:30 (didn't realize it until five minutes later), and worked until we stopped for lunch at an autogrill.
After this we got back on the road, determined to make it to Carcassonne. All of this time I spent working on schoolwork and occasionally glancing out the window at the multi-colored hills, and at the cars zooming by (or us by them). My glances upwards didn't last very long though. I needed to complete my work and I managed to while on the road. 
Once I was done I was left to a staring contest with my spanish book which was sitting right next to me. Right now that class is my worst nightmare. I'm far behind the rest of the class back home, I know I'm not remembering what I do in the book, and I know it wouldn't help me to rush and try to catch up. As the book sat there staring at me I tried to ignore it by looking out the window and covering it up with my jacket. This did not work. It demanded my attention and eventually succeeded. I tried to get farther in the book, but when I started running into words that the book didn't have in it's glossary, words that I didn't know, and words that hadn't been reviewed in the chapter, I started wondering what I was supposed to do. I skipped that and moved ahead. I ended up running into the same problem later. At that point I was glad that we were going into Carcasonne, because I didn't know what to do, and I was only frustrating myself more. I threw the book in my backpack, giving it a spiteful look, and then I joined Ahmee and Poppy in the quest for a hotel. We found one purely by accident that was right next to the foot bridge that crossed the river (and that was connected to the road that went straight up to the fortified old city).
This hotel had three stars, had wireless, and had a place where Ahmee could rest. Ahmee was not feeling good at all. Poppy and I weren't sure what was wrong, we just knew she wanted to have a good long siesta. We also knew that she wanted us to go up and walk around the walls of the old city without her and to come back and let her know what it was like. Before we headed out I sent out things on the computer and emailed a few people.
When Poppy and I went out we both commented on how lucky we were to find our hotel, I asked him if he'd found a post office (we almost always have about 20 or so postcards to send), and we commented on the things we were seeing. We passed over the river on the foot bridge (me exclaiming at how shallow the river was), and walked through the windy street up to the top of the hill to the old, fortified town of Carcassinne. Some of my favorite shops that I saw included: a nice antique shop (not unusual, these stores are like rooting through a treasure chest), a magic store (had a kid book about the princess and the unicorn AND had an entire wall filled with incense), and a fashionable "fat lady" store that I knew Ahmee would've loved. Other things we passed on our way up included: a church or two (one with a colorful painting on it's outside wall-definitely not graffiti), a few apartments, and plenty of closed up restaurants. At the top we went through the main entrance with all the other tourists, all of whom seemed to me to be getting off of some sort of bus. We were oddballs and had decided to hoof it. After passing through two gates we went up a flight of stairs up to the keep of the second inner wall so we could get tickets to walk around the top and around the castle. As we walked up I could feel the eyes of all the other tourists watching us, before we even walked in I realized how odd it must appear to others to see a gray-haired man traveling with a young girl like me. When we bought the tickets we got some odd looks from both of the vendors who refused to believe I was 16 (she seemed to know enough English to understand the number I was saying). Poppy got charged extra because of this. Of course, at the time neither one of us knew this, we just took our tickets and went out to walk around the ancient city and to look out at the valley and the "new" city.
I loved both views this walk offered. We got to see the rooftops, the forest that was on the far outreaches of the "new" city, the route we'd just walked up, our hotel from a distance, and the many different building styles that made up the city. Within the walls we got to be incredibly nosey, something that I enjoy being. I got to look down into EVERYONES courtyard and onto their back terraces. I also got to spy on the tourists who were walking through the back alleys obviously lost (I had no sympathy because it's quite easy to make your way back to the main road if you'd just take a closer look at your map/ask for directions/turn around and walk back to where-ever you came from and make your way back to a place where you actually know where the general exit is).
The walls I was walking on were also equally interesting (except for the pigeon infested towers-the poop covered the floor and I basically just ducked my head and ran through) because I got to feel as if I were walking on a miniature Great Wall of China. The walkway was well done, had many different steps so that if it came to hand-battle up on the wall the invaders wouldn't know what's coming whereas someone familiar would and would run too fast and crash down, and the walkway had high enough borders so that I didn't feel like if I got too close I'd fall over the edge. Poppy and I are both prone to getting dizzy and weak-kneed when we feel we've reached uncomfortable heights and are unprotected. Luckily neither one of us got that feeling as we walked the distance around the ancient city.
When we got to the main castle we stopped and read our pamphlets and then went down the steps into the main courtyard where a nice frenchman told us where to begin and told us about the guide they had to offer. He said that he only spoke a little French, and the guided tour was in french, but if we were to join in he'd add a tidbit here and there of English. We thanked him for telling us where to get started, but we did not take him up on his offer for the guided tour, saying we needed to get back at a certain time. We then went up and into the castle where we stopped and watched a video over it's history (it had subtitles in English that were easy for me to follow). To summarize, the fortified city, Caracassonne , went through many phases of rise and decline. At one point it was taken over by the French royalty (after the duke who had owned it became far too powerful in the Popes eyes and the Pope gave the crown the permission to start a crusade to get rid of him and his society of monks-they laid siege and the duke stupidly thought he could reason with the men who'd slaughtered 6,000 people-the people were allowed to leave unscathed but the duke died a prisoner in his own castle) and became a royal outpost (to guard the French border from the nearby Spanish- the Pyrenees mountains were only a couple kilometers to the south). Under the royal crown the outpost quickly became one of the best forts, and to many civilian eyes it was a monster, many people moved out of the old town to the new town to commence with business and trade. At a certain point the royal crown decided they no longer needed this as an outpost to keep an eye on the border and so it was left to rot (as much as stone can rot). Later the man who restored the Notre Dame made repairs to this fortified city, and made it so that it resembled the outpost that it had been when the French Crown had used it. Of course, since the crown left other people had come in and made their own adjustments and add ons, so there were still remainders of other buildings within the walls. We got to see these as we walked around. I never mentioned that the base of the outer wall had to be uncovered (layers of dirt had covered up parts of it), and that the Romans had had their part in the wall, meaning that people have been living on that hill for ages. After watching this video we went through the museum where we got to see a miniature of the town and it's magnificant cathedral (sadly we didn't get to walk around this), we got to see different methods to defense and weaponry, we got to see the different sections of the castle (other than the living quarters), and we got to go through a section where it contained old carvings and tombstones from both the church and the castle. I wasn't too interested in these but what surprised me were different pictures that were in these rooms, funnily enough they puzzled Poppy too. In each room there was a photograph of a man standing naked in the middle of a field/on top of a hill. Each one was photographed from his backside and in each one he was holding something above his head. In some of them he had a rectangular stone above his head, in some of them he was standing next to a huge rectangular stone, and in others he had a trashcan on his head. Later Poppy discussed these pictures with Ahmee and it was decided that these pictures where meant to symbolize how man could utterly deface nature (because everything around him was gorgeous). Course, I thought the naked man blended in with nature in all of them, except for the one with the trashcan on his head.
When we finished walking through the museum we could feel the chill of the coming night air settling through the rocks. We knew we needed to start heading back to Ahmee at that point. So we walked through the inner gate, crossed the moat (as we did so we were watched by the resting tourists who were on the other side, chowing down on their early dinners), and had a good time walking around looking for a short period for the exit. We found it when we pushed the giant wooden door open (this was easier for Poppy than it was for me). Once out of the castle I breathed a sigh of relief. We were on the main road. How could I tell? All of the shops were open all the way down the street and all kinds of tour groups were laughing and chatting as they walked from a sweet shop to a souvenir shop and on down to catch a glimpse of the castle as the sun started making its way down to the horizon. Even though I really liked the looks of these shops, I knew I shouldn't stop and go in, we needed to get out of there and we weren't sure just how long we'd have to walk. Surprisingly enough the city looked bigger from above than it actually was. We got to the entrance gate in less than 5 minutes and then started making our way down (very quickly because I was starting to get kinda cold-I hadn't brought my coat) the hill as I pointed out buildings and said, "I told ya this was _______! I told ya this was _______!" As Poppy just smiled and said, "Nuh uhhhhhhh!" Before we got to the bridge we passed a couple open restaurants that were selling pain sandwiches, we decided we probably shouldn't get one of these and kept moving, crossing over the bridge and back to the hotel.Once back at the hotel we walked in and joyfully told Ahmee all about our adventures (me grumpy that I couldn't remember specific names for Ahmee whenever I recounted the cities history) and asked her how she was feeling and whether or not she was up to going out for dinner. Actually, one of the first questions I asked her was whether or not she'd gotten a good nap or not. She told me she hadn't slept at all, and that she'd just been resting with her eyes closed the whole time. When I asked if that helped her at all she said, "Oh yes, I think so. It's my eyes that were hurting me." She felt that if she closed her eyes enough they'd stop feeling so bad. Since I wasn't the one feeling the pain I can't be sure if her eyes where itchy, if her eyes felt like golfballs, or if her eyes just felt strained (these are things that I've felt myself-it happens when you don't have perfect eyes). I can make an educated guess though. Ahmee has a hard time keeping her eyes moist. Her eyes are often red or pink at various hours of the day. Why is this? Her eyes don't produce enough tears anymore to keep them from drying out too much, so she has to put eyedrops in several times per day. I'm normally the one to let her know that her eyes are pink and that she needs to get her eye-drop's out. Whenever I've cried a lot my eyes feel like golfballs, they might not look pink, but they feel terrible. I'm guessing that this is what was bothering Ahmee. Another good reason I think this is that if they were itching her eyes wouldn't have felt any better being shut-in fact it often helps holding them open so that the air cools them down and keeps whatever it is that's bothering your eye from coming into even closer contact with it.
We traded our stories back and forth, confessed that we were all getting hungry and groaned when we heard that dinner didn't start in the hotel until 8 o clock (you'd think we'd be used to this by now, but we aren't, we still get hungry around 6). So while I got to work writing/reading Poppy went downstairs and got us snackies. I got to eat bugles for the first time in a loooong time. I'd forgotten how much I liked those things and how I always liked putting them on my fingers so that I looked like I had cat-nails (this was easier to do with I had smaller fingers). I stopped my work for a short period to eat all of the bugles, sharing only a few with Ahmee and Poppy as they ate something else (I'm not a complete hog).
When we went upstairs to the candle-light dining area that had the panoramic view of the fort I was already starting to feel tired. I pushed hard throughout dinner to make it to desert by talking and by getting Ahmee and Poppy to talk about the many different forts we'd see (this one looked similar to the Edinbourgh Castle), but it really was all in vain. After my plate got taken away I asked if I could go to the room and go to bed. I knew that I had only a short period of time before I passed out because I was pulling a Dustin Clausen. My younger cousin Dustin has a way of letting everyone know when he's about to fall asleep in his chair. First his eye-lids will start getting heavy and his eyes will shut and then pop open again, then his head will start dropping and then popping back up as if he's saying, "I'm awake! I'm awake!". His eyes will slowly start to be shut more and more and soon his head will just stay down. This is when everyone knows he's gone. I do the exact same thing. I can be asleep in under 5 minutes after my eyelids start getting heavy. While at the table I got to the point where I didn't want to hold my head up, where I no longer cared if I ended up with sauce in my hair (I have fallen asleep in my plate before), and where I no longer cared if my eyes remained shut for more than 15 seconds at a time. When these things happen only a select few things can keep me from falling asleep (example: something that makes me really happy and a good conversation-Iain used to talk to me till late hours of the night and only a few times did I fall asleep on him).
At any rate, Poppy took me downstairs (as we passed our waitress she gave me a small smile, as if she knew I was about to konk out), and let me into the room (taking the key with him). I managed to get into my pj's (very slowly because I was half-asleep while doing it), and then I flopped into bed at 8:30.
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