Two Days in Toulouse

The hotel breakfast had everything you could ask for, I am glad it was included in the upgrade as its 26 € each if you had to pay for it and looking at their web site none of the prices include breakfast.
Then off into town to wander round some more, taking a ride on the road train. There are two of these that take different routes around the town with a commentary and its a good way to find out where things are . Unfortunately only one route was available, this was due to roads being closed for a football match that was taking place at the weekend.

We also went on the open top City Tour bus which took us to the more outlying parts of the city.

Once we had our bearings it was off on foot. Lots of the streets are semi pedestrianised with rising bollards stopping unauthorised traffic. On the main roads the pavements are quite wide, probably 5mt. which is just as well as you share not only with cyclists but skate boarders and Segway users. We visited all the local tourist spots including the local parks.

    
We also visited the Toulouse museum
The Couvent des Jacobins is a large convent with cloisters and box hedging. in case you are wondering the thing that looks like a slide is, it actually plays a tune when the wooden ball is allowed to run down it. Each piece of wood that the ball lands on is of the correct length to give a specific note and each piece was placed on the rack by a member of the audience.
We also visited Basilique St Sernin, at weekends this is surrounded by a flee market and on our second visit a funeral was taking place.
         Another church we looked round was the eglise St Pierre des Chartreux this had some interesting features including a wooden spiral staircase leading up to the organ
The river Garonne runs right through Toulouse with several bridges crossing it, over  the years it has seen several floods and this old bridge only survived because the builders built it with holes in the support pillars.
There is a weir crossing the river between the bridges and at this point there is a hydro electric plant both sides of the river, the one on the east side has a
suspended walkway running round the front of it
The one on the west side is owned by EDF and is open to the public but we didn’t have time to visit.
On the east bank just upstream from the weir is the old hospital, this has also withstood the river flooding over the years.

The river Garonne is connected to the Canal du Midi and the Canal latéral à la Garonne by a very short canal know as the Canal de Brienne, this joins the River Garonne just above the weir on the east side via a lock under a bridge.

While looking for somewhere to eat we found a nice little restaurant tucked away in the entrance to an art gallery housed in Hotel d' Assezat. The gallery was closed and we didn’t eat there as it was tucked away so there was nothing to watch while you eat, very important when eating outside in my opinion. One thing that struck us was the double helix of the columns at one of the entrances, did they know something about DNA?  

So as you can see we had a couple of full days in Toulouse.   

Our Barge Holiday starts HERE