Adieu la belle France - Hola España!

For our last day in France, we walked a section of the pilgrims' trail, the Camino de Santiago de Composela. If you have seen the film, "The Way", you would know that this ancient pilgrims' route has various starting points in France and Spain; there are a couple of ways across the Pyrenees and the trails converge on the cathedral in Santiago de Campostela. I'm not saying how much of the trail we walked but we did locate a number (two is a number) of the trail markers,

saw many other pilgrims (or joggers) on the path and we were back to the apartment in time for lunch.The trail follows l'Aude river through Carcassonne which has a number of crossings and a weir.

We later decided to take a restful trip down the Canal du Midi on one of the many canal boats catering to tourists like us. The canal begins in Toulouse, heads south-east through Carcassonne and down to sea level at Narbonne. You can actually travel from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic along this and other canals and links through a number of rivers. There are quite a few locks on the canal, some multi-stage ones, but we only travelled through two single ones.

And so to Spain ...
We had a very early start, train at 7:30 and still dark (summer time is still operating). Change of trains at Narbonne and on to Barcelona. The trip along the coast had some nice scenery particularly through areas similar to the Camargue marshes. We arrived at the central station which had a direct link to the Metro line we wanted, which exits at the Sagrada Familia cathedral - in fact our apartment is straight across the road from it.
This cathedral has been under construction since 1882 and the design is by Antoni Gaudi. Unfortunately, this means it's still a building site as there is a lot more construction to do, including four more towers; but the sheer size and design are phenomenal. We've already done a lap around the block to check it out from all angles.