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Thursday morning I get a slow start. Fine with me. While getting dressed, I watch a quiz show on TV. At home I work on my French by reading literature and watching French movies and listening to French radio podcasts and lectures from the Collège de France. While in France, I can aim a little lower on the cultural spectrum. Even the commercials are informative. During commercials for food, messages scroll across the screen warning against snacking between meals or eating food that is too salty, sugary or fatty.

I figure it is time for lunch.

I choose Les Arcades, one of several restaurants whose terraces line one side of the Place du Capitole. It has a nice menu and a seat with a view of all the action. I order cassoulet and think about the first time I came to Toulouse, in 1972. My friend Ellen and I were traveling around Europe, and we were changing trains in Toulouse. We had an hour or two between trains, so we walked from the station to see the St-Sernin Basilica, which had three stars, vaut le voyage (worth the journey) in the Michelin green guide. (I still have that book.) Then we stopped at a restaurant on the way back to the station and had cassoulet. So I order the cassoulet, but I regret passing up the lamb's brains that are on the menu du jour.

Since I've had cassoulet, I figure I should go to the St-Sernin Basilica. They just seem to go together. So I head off in the right direction but get distracted by a bookstore along the way. That doesn't last long. As I stand in front of the bookshelves and try to read the book titles, they all start to spin. OK, I won't be buying books on this trip.

On the street corner across the street from the basilica, a man is playing the violin very badly. I would pay him to stop, but I want neither to insult nor to encourage him, so I sit on a bench and accept the music as part of the atmosphere while I take some photos. Looking up for photos is all right as long as I am sitting down.

I make my way around the outside of the church and then go inside. Nothing about it is familiar from my visit in 1972. But I am pretty uninformed about church architecture now and was even more so thirty-seven years ago, so there wasn't a lot of detail to carry in my memory. Now that I have returned home and have spoken to Ellen, I have learned that she doesn't remember much about it either. But she does remember the cassoulet.

This evening I am going to hear pianist Till Fellner at the cloister of the Eglise des Jacobins. While St-Sernin is Romanesque, the Eglise des Jacobins is Gothic. I have learned this much. Evidently there was a contest between the two for the highest tower, and St-Sernin added two Gothic tiers to its Romanesque tower after the Jacobins tower was completed. The cloister is filling with people for the concert. The piano is in an indoor area where there is a stage set up and many of the seats, but there are also seats spilling outside. The indoor seats are reserved, and the ones outside are open seating. People are moving them around the cloister to get better angles.

I have reserved a seat inside, and I enjoy this concert very much. Till Fellner is young and energetic and bounds up the steps to the stage two at a time. He plays an all Beethoven program. The setting and acoustics are wonderful.

After the concert, I pass the same restaurant where I had dinner last night, Le Patio, and since they are still serving, I go in again. Tonight there is a menu for 23 euros, not including wine or water. I start with foie gras served with mirabelles, which turn out to be little plums. Then there is émincé de magret de canard, sliced duck breast. All very good.

The streets are even more filled with people tonight at midnight than they were last night. I make my way back to the hotel against the tide.

I'm up in time for breakfast on Saturday for the first time all week. I must be adjusting to the time zone just in time to leave the city for the sleepy countryside. I meet Sheila and her husband at their hotel as planned, and we are soon on the road.

It is under two hours to Luby Betmont. I am excited to be returning to this lovely house where I spent two weeks with my family. This will be a very different experience, though. Sheila and her husband have invited a house full of guests, most of whom do not know each other. We are the first to arrive. We drop off our bags and head into the nearest town, Trie sur Baïse, for groceries and lunch at the café.

The café L'Ancien is on the central square in Trie. This town is a bastide, a town laid out on a rectangular grid around a market square during the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Many of the towns in this area follow this pattern and this history. They were planned and built by landowners trying to populate the countryside and facilitate tax collection, and marked a change from a feudal society to a society where people engaged in trade. These towns are very recognizable as one drives through them, especially by the central square and the covered market, with businesses located around the periphery under arcades.

In addition to L'Ancien, the square in Trie is ringed by the butcher, two bakers, the produce store, another café and tabac, a hotel (which is, I understand, for sale), a pharmacy, a hairdresser, an art gallery/reflexology center, a wine store, a small market, and a bank or two. There are two more bakers on side streets, another butcher, another hairdresser (where two years ago my daughter had the best haircut of her life), and other assorted necessities of small town life.

While in Paris and in Toulouse, the oldest bridge is the Pont Neuf, in Trie the café known as L'Ancien has the name Café Moderne printed on the façade. We sit on the terrace and have salads and plan the stores we will visit for supplies. I go to the butcher and buy two kinds of pate. The woman in the butcher's shop remembers me from two years ago. We pick out fruit at the produce store, including the most gorgeous nectarines I have ever seen (they tasted spectacular also). There are mirabelles, the little plums I had had in Toulouse. And there are glorious melons from Lectoure.

We bring back our supplies and get settled in the house. It is beautiful and warm, and we spend the rest of the day outside. Life is good. Sheila prepares a wonderful dinner. We had expected three more of the party to arrive in time for dinner, but their plane is delayed, so we eat without them. When they finally arrive at 11:00, they have dinner, we join them for dessert (apricot tart) and we stay up late talking and laughing.

Monday morning a group goes to the weekly market in Mirande, a bastide in the Gers, an area known for raising ducks. The agricultural high school has a stand selling cans of foie gras and other duck products. The booths in the indoor market represent local farmers and outdoors there are booths selling products from farther afield. The market spills into the neighboring streets and through the town. We return with a free range chicken and vegetables and a croustade (flaky pastry made with apples and Armagnac) for dinner.

On the way back to the house, we stop at a duck farm. I recognize the owner as the man in a picture I took two years ago, when I must have visited the same farm. And indeed it is the same. I recognize the newspaper clipping with the picture of a Gascon salad made with lettuce, smoked duck breasts and sliced duck hearts stuffed with foie gras. This picture inspired a meal two years ago, and I buy jars of the duck hearts to bring back to Massachusetts with me. Hoping it is OK with customs.

After a relaxing outdoor lunch assembled from the market and the previous visits to the butcher and boulangeries, a few of us mount an expedition to a pottery studio and shop near Boulogne-sur-Gesse. I visited this pottery on my previous stay and had purchased some nice pieces for my house, and the house in Luby also contains quite a bit of it. On this occasion, however, we arrive to find the pottery closed for vacation. We make a brief stop at a regional cooperative selling local products and head back to the house for the rest of the day.

The weather here, just north of the Pyrenees, is interesting. So far it has been so hazy and cloudy that we have not been able to see the mountains. The clouds seem to stack up on the north slope of the mountains, and the house in Luby is frequently under the shadow of this cloud cover. Driving just a few miles north can bring much clearer skies.

A group has been planning to drive over the mountains to Spain, and we are trying to decide which day is likely to bring the best weather. But the weather reports change day by day, hour by hour. As it looks cloudy and unpromising, and as the weather report is predicting rain for Tuesday, we decide we will make the trip Wednesday. This of course ensures that the weather on Tuesday will end up being beautiful, which of course it is. But by the time we realize this, it is too late to go to Spain.

Instead we go to the weekly market in Trie. One of the things I find interesting about this and the other markets in the countryside is the presence of large numbers of vendors of cheap clothing. This is clearly not meant for tourists but for local shoppers and I wonder how much of it is actually sold. Do people come to these markets for clothing? Is there a scarcity of discount clothing stores in the countryside and do these vendors fill that void?

One of my missions is to find some wine to bring back to my husband. When we were here two years ago, we visited the nearby wine producing area of Madiran, and it is nearly impossible to find this wine in the US. My husband has developed a taste for it, so I go to pick out some wine for him. Sheila accompanies me to the wine store, where she has befriended the owner. (At our vacation home on Cape Cod, we befriended the owner of the fish market, so I understand the interpersonal dynamics here. It is just a difference in priorities.) I come away from the shop with two promising bottles to pack in the clothes in my checked luggage and hope they make it home intact.


In the afternoon we drive to Montréjeau, a town with several stores selling brocante. Sheila is looking for a bed. We visit three stores. The first two are in the center of town. In the first shop I find a set from the 1920s of cups and a barrel for serving eau de vie. I am picturing this in the room my daughter calls my French kitchen, on a shelf above the Quimper cider barrel and cups. In the second shop I find some used books, including L'Avare by Molière, which is on my list of things to bring back from France because I have a ticket to see the play in Paris at the Comédie Française. I am happy to see that I can look at the book titles without losing my balance; the vertigo is improving.

The third store is a bit trickier to find. It is located in a barn on the way out of town. The property is quirky; there is an aviary with parrots out front. In the back, Sheila finds a four poster bed that had been in a hotel. I take pictures to help her decide, and we leave without making any purchases.

We drive to the nearby town of St-Bertrand-de-Comminges, site of a Roman town founded by the general Pompey to defend the pass over the mountains to Spain. There is a medieval town and a cathedral used by pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. While there, we get a phone call that two more guests have arrived at the house, and we drive back to greet them.

Thursday morning is clear and bright. The mountains are visible through the window from the house for the first time all week. An excursion is being planned over breakfast heading back up into the mountains, this time toward the Cirque de Gavarnie. This is a steep-walled rocky mass in the shape of an amphitheater on the French side of the Pyrenees. We had been looking at the same peaks from the Spanish side on yesterday's excursion.

We drive up the valley of the Gave de Pau, the river that has its source at the Cirque de Gavarnie and flows down through Pau and eventually into the Adour before the Adour empties into the Atlantic near Bayonne. We pass through Lourdes but do not stop. We climb steadily until we are on the small road leading up to the tourist town of Gavarnie. The guide book says that after passing the village of Gèdre we will have a view of the Cirque de Gavarnie, and so we do.

We decide to drive up past Gavarnie on the very steep and winding road that ends near the Spanish border. Our decision is immediately rewarded, as we spot a large number of griffon vultures circling above. (The identification is not made so quickly, however. There is quite a bit of discussion among the more knowledgeable birders in the party, and the question is finally resolved when we are back at the house with a book to compare to the photos taken at the site.) We stop to look and realize that there is a dead cow higher up on the slope and the vultures are feeding. The road goes quite near the spot, so we drive up and park there, hoping for a close-up view of the vultures.

We spend some time there, watching and photographing. We are joined by another car or two. After a while one of the other people there asks if we are done photographing, as he wants to walk over to check out the cow. If I understand correctly, he wants to see whether it is really dead. His wife calls out that she hopes his insurance is paid up. He goes and naturally all the vultures fly away, to the annoyance of members of our party. One of the members of the other party says that there is an over-population of vultures, and that the cows are being attacked even before they die naturally. It seems more likely to the members of our party that the cow fell down the steep slope, and that the concern of these people for the cow over the vultures represents the farmer's perspective.

The newspaper La Dépêche has been featuring the story of a sheep carcass found in the Pyrenees. A bear is suspected of killing it. This is bad news for farmers but good news for conservationists, who have been reintroducing the brown bear into the area in an attempt to build up the population, which had declined to near extinction.

I am wondering if we submit our photos whether the next edition of La Dépêche will feature the headline "Dead Cow, Vultures Suspected". Maybe on a very slow news day.

We continue our drive up past a ski area and then past a sign that we are entering the Parc National des Pyrénées. We catch sight of a marmot as we drive along. One member of our party says that his day would be complete if he could photograph a marmot. I am wondering about this. Basically as I understand it, the marmot is a woodchuck. Some years ago, I spoke to a farmer at a farm stand at home in Massachusetts about how to get rid of woodchucks in the garden. He gave me some kind of bomb to put down its hole. That bomb sat in our bathroom closet for a very long time. According to my husband, we don't have it any more, but I'm not so sure. I stopped gardening shortly thereafter.

I also learned fairly late in life that woodchuck is just another name for groundhog. I tell this to our party and they are skeptical. I tell them it is true, that Groundhog Day is really about the same animal as woodchucks. They are confused. They know Groundhog Day only as a movie, not as a celebration of Punxsutawney Phil. They are Scottish. But I digress.

We park at the end of the road and take in the wide view of mountain peaks and valleys. Some members of the party head up a footpath to walk a bit and see the view from even higher up. I notice that the road continues past a barrier and speculate that walking in that direction one would be in Spain fairly quickly.

As we drive back down, someone spots a marmot at the side of the road. We stop to try to photograph it, but it is too quick, and the photographer captures only its rear end. We spot another one. And then we see nothing but marmots everywhere we look. The hills are alive. We pull over and the photographer's day is complete.

We descend to the town of Gavarnie and park, hoping to find a place for lunch. But all the places we check have stopped serving, even though it is only around 2:00. I go into a café and ask if they are still serving lunch, and they tell me they are open for drinks only. The group decides we will stop here for coffee and then drive back down the mountains in search of lunch. But one member of our party (the photographer) asks whether there is anything to eat. His charm obviously appeals to the proprietress more than mine did, and she says she is "pauvre" in food but she will go back to the kitchen to see what she has. She comes back and offers us crepes, which we are happy to order.

While we are eating, we see several bus tours arrive in the small town. A load of people from one of the buses comes into the café but they have apparently had their lunch already and are only here for drinks. There is an astounding number of tour buses in this small place, and we are glad that we hadn't encountered them on the road.

Gavarnie is the jumping-off point for excursions into the Cirque de Gavarnie, which can be accomplished on foot or on mule. It is apparently also the destination of busloads of daytrippers. I speculate that these tour buses are from Lourdes, which is within a reasonable distance to head up this way after lunch. We head back down the road before the buses can catch up with us.

We stop in Lourdes at a supermarket for supplies for dinner. We can see the castle above the town but we do not head into town to see the pilgrimage site. I am somewhat curious after reading conflicting accounts of the town's commercialism and of its spirituality, but it is late and we have promises to keep.

Back in Luby-Betmont, we decide to go to a vernissage (opening) at the art gallery on the square in Trie. The gallery is operated by a woman who also practices reflexology out of the same space. She is a member of the British expatriate community and the gallery is filled with people speaking English. There are interesting works of art and photography, as well as wine and cold pizza. I am pleased to see that I can look at the art on the walls without swaying back and forth. Things are looking up, as it were. We do not stay long.

Saturday morning I pack my bags. I am leaving Luby-Betmont today for Toulouse, where I will spend one last night before flying home on Sunday. Two of the guests are flying back to Scotland this evening, and they will drive me to Toulouse. Their flight does not leave until evening, so we have decided to join the group driving up to Bagnères-de-Bigorre for the weekly market this morning.

This is a very good market, with vendors who come down from the mountains with the produce from their own gardens. There are people selling figs, lettuce, dried flowers, eggs, milk, and cheese. There are also many stalls with large selections of charcuterie and baked goods. I buy some sheep's milk cheese and some slices of local ham to bring with me. I have a seven hour layover in Paris tomorrow, and this will be a much better lunch than the fare sold in the departure lounge at the airport.

The entire group gathers for drinks at a café and we say our thank-yous and good-byes. Those who are remaining are going to the spa in Bagnères, where there are hot whirlpools, saunas, and steam baths. Those of us who are leaving head back to the car and drive to Toulouse. We only get a little bit lost finding my hotel- not nearly as lost as my husband got finding the same hotel two years ago when a number of streets were closed for construction. And the driver becomes only a little bit anxious- not nearly as anxious as my husband did when after two hours of driving around the narrow one-way streets he hit a post and dinged the rental car. More thank-yous and good-byes follow, and I am on my own again.

For this final night, I have reserved a room at the Hotel Albert Premier (http://www.hotel-albert1.com/). This hotel is less expensive than the Grand Balcons, where I stayed at the beginning of the trip. My room is smaller than the one I shared with my husband at this hotel two years ago, and much smaller than the one our two daughters had on that same occasion. It is also more utilitarian. But it is fine. It is bigger than my room at the Grand Balcon but has a smaller bathroom with a walk-in shower.

For my final evening in France, I head back to the Place Wilson and eat at Le Bon Vivre, where I had my first meal. Once again I pass over the skewered duck hearts with a tinge of regret, but I am wanting duck confit, a dish I love but for some reason have not managed to get yet on this foray into duck country. The indoor dining room is full and the evening is cool but I am happy to sit on the patio and watch the passing scene.

There is an American couple at the table next to mine enjoying a leisurely dinner. They are engaged in people watching and are talking to each other about their observations of those who go by. I startle them when at the end of my meal I turn and say, "Where are you folks from?" They look grateful that at least they haven't been talking about me. They are from California and have just completed a barge cruise on the Canal du Midi. We talk for a while about our trips. I have told them that I live in Massachusetts, but the man says to me, "That's not where you come from originally, is it?" My New York roots are showing, and they tell me they are also originally from New York.

I am somewhat pleased that my accent still gives me away. Regional accents seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate. Here in the deep south of France, I have noticed a distinctive accent that I can not reproduce, but when I hear it again I will know where the speaker comes from. There are nasal "ng" sounds at the end of words where I wouldn't expect them, such as in the word "vin". Interesting.

It has started to rain, so we talk a while and wait until the rain lightens up. I head back to my hotel and order a taxi to take me to the airport in the morning. The flight to Paris is uneventful. The layover is long, but I have my excellent ham and cheese to tide me over. I buy some French books at the airport, read for quite a while, and get on the flight to Boston. I have an anxious moment or two at customs while I wait to see whether my foie gras and stuffed duck hearts will be allowed into the country. The customs officer says duck is fine. They just want to look at the ingredients to make sure there is no beef. Everything is acceptable, and the wine has not spilled in the suitcase. So the luggage, the contents, and I are all back safe and sound.