"pyrenees"

Train-Ski packages from SNCF-TER are a great deal There is simply no beating the price of the convenience of buying the SKIRAIL package from SNCF-TER. For less than €50, you can get a round-trip train ticket from Toulouse to Ax-les-Thermes which also includes a ski pass for the day. If you want, you can also reserve ski equipment from a partner for a reasonable price. The trip is about 2 hours on the regional TER train. Ax 3 Domaines It’s easy to take this station for granted becasue it’s probably the most accessible from Toulouse. But Ax 3 Domaines is…

Tourism is serious business in France. And so this week, the Tourism Office of the Haute-Garonne Department held their annual press conference to explain their strategy for marketing their corner of France and attracting those economically important tourists. In a Department that stretches from the cosmopolitan city of Toulouse to the upper reaches of the Pyrénées, it’s a varied stretch. But seducing those tourists is critical, particularly for those small, independent businesses that produce local delicacies or run lodging of some sort. To that end, this year’s promotional focus will be: The Secret Haute-Garonne. Yes, people know about the big…

One of the things we love about Toulouse is how quickly we can escape from the city on the weekend and be in a place that feels remote. Thanks to some friends who organized a hike this weekend, we dashed out to the small village of Montgazin for a wonderful 2-hour walk. Mongazin is a blink-and-you-missed-it town about 45 minutes south of Toulouse. Its main feature is a chuch whose date of origin we couldn’t quite pinpoint. From the church parking lot, we walked straight back on the main local road which led us to a trail. You can see…

Driving about an hour southeast from Toulouse, a short hop off the highway just before Carcassone puts one right in the middle of the Aude Department. Beyond the famous fortress, the Aude produces fantastic wines and offers tantalizing views of the Pyrenees. For the second year, we roused ourselves early on a Sunday morning and drove down here with our friends Rebecca and Bernard to Château Guilhem. Situated in the little town of Malviès, in the territory of Malepère, the wine estate was holding its annual harvest fundraiser to support Autisme 31, a non-profit. It’s a great cause, but for us, it’s…

On Sunday morning, we drove about 90 minutes southeast to the town of Lagrasse, France to visit a friend and do some hiking. The town is in the Aude Departement, tucked in between Carcassone, Narbonne, and the Pyrenees. It’s tough to get a sense of any French town on a Sunday, as most everything is closed. But Lagrasse’s city center has a reputation for attracting a lot of artists and creatives, and we passed a lot of local shops that allowed us to glimpse some of that in their window displays. And we did to happen to find a shop open for…