Before you travel to a place – any place – for the first time, you should always try to wipe the slate of your memory clean of everything you have ever heard or read about it. Otherwise, why come at all? You can save yourself the money and effort of actually going there by just…
If you travel to the extreme southwest of France in bleak midwinter, the Pyrenees – whose distant peaks are distinctly visible throughout much of the region – provide something like a permanent tease. Shrouded in clouds and covered with snow, they are clearly not sending out any “come-and-visit-me“ signals, but at the same time they…
The Canal du Midi is one of the greatest feats of civil engineering in the history of the world. Its construction stretched the 17th century’s technological knowledge and ingenuity to its very limits, much as the Channel Tunnel project would 300 years later. For nearly 2000 years, people had been dreaming of a navigable waterway…
