Trip Diary Part VI - Toulouse

France, 10/2/05 (I messed up the dates here somehow)

We took the train from Souilliac back to Toulouse and checked our luggage into the left luggage section at the station.
Since we didn't really know what we were doing, we did a lot of wandering around the city trying to find a place to have lunch. Again, we were thwarted by the fact that everything was closed at just the right time one would eat lunch. We did find a couple of places, but no one could agree on any one place. Needless to say I was a bit frustrated. FINALLY we sat down at a French version of the London chain of Pizza Express called Pizza Mazanos located in the Capitol square. The food was nothing to write home about, and we had a terrible carafe of sangria. The location was great, but it started to pour. We headed into the restaurant (we'd been sitting outside) and waited for the rain to stop. When it did we headed towards the big church in Toulouse, which was just amazingly gorgeous. Since it had been raining, the sky was still dark but the sun was shining and it just lit up the church spire. Then we walked over a patisserie for our final taste of French pastry. Needless to say, the chocolate eclair I had was better than anything I've had stateside. The whole store was the size of a walkin closet, but had more than 20 different varieties of bread in addition to all the pastries. As soon as we stepped out of the store, it began to rain and I mean RAIN. It continued to pour for another half hour or so, right up until we had to head back to the train station and pick up our luggage.
The latest bus we could take back to the airport was at 7:20 pm. And we got to the station for our luggage at 7:11 pm. We managed to get to the bus at 7:19; the driver wouldn't open the luggage compartments for us and we had to drag our huge suitcases onto the bus. When we got to the airport, our flight was delayed for another 45 minutes, which left ample time to hang out in the tiny duty free shop and try on every perfume they had on display. By the time we got on the plane, I was ready to throw up from the smell. The flight was OK and we managed to hop on a train back to London from Gatwick right before it left.

All in all the trip was wonderful. I ate way too much, saw some amazing things, met a couple of really fantastic people, and got to reconnect with an old friend.
If only I could spend my whole life on vacation....