Day 7 - Where we hike the Canal du Midi and the Canal du Brienne and learn how the French open wine bottles. Sunny 55°F (13°C)

We got up at a good time this morning, and breakfasted on baguette with butter and jam, and some hard-boiled eggs. I prepared a couple of sandwiches and we packed up a picnic and set out to explore the Canal du Midi.

I had no idea what this Canal was, but it's a really important part of the history of this region. It's also a Unesco World Heritage Site.

The Canal du Midi was built during the reign of Louis XIV, between 1667 and 1681, and is one of the oldest canals in Europe that is still in operation. It made the age-old dream of creating an inland connection between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean come true. It provided an alternative shipping route for any who wished to circumvent the risk of encountering the pirates of the Barbary coast when sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Ships could traverse the canal from the Mediterranean to Toulouse, then connect to the Garonne River, which flows north-west through Bordeaux to join with the Dordogne and out to the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean.

The entire canal is officially 360km and you can hike the whole thing, but for us, we decided to walk the stretch from Toulouse Matabaiu (the train station) to the place where Canal du Midi intersects with the Garonne. I think bike trip along here someday would be a wonderful way to explore the region.

Our starting point was the main Toulouse train station:

The day was cool in the shade, but warm in the sun; the trees were mostly bare and we could see how different this might look in high summer; but then again, we had much clearer views into the surrounding neighborhoods that weren't blocked by foliage.

Most of path is paved and even in winter, it was very picturesque.

We passed a few locks, that looked like they hadn't been used in a while.

We paused for lunch at the Jardin japonais

If you look closely, you can see a koi fish; that water is pretty murky but there were many large koi sluggishly floating about.

Eventually, we came to the spot where the Canal du Midi meets up with the Canal Du Brienne, and we got to walk under a few bridges and see a couple more locks:

The Canal du Brienne had a different feel, but was also very pretty.

We ended up back at the Garonne River, from which it was a short jaunt back to our apartment. Once there, we discovered that the bottle of wine we had purchased was impossible to open with the provided bottle opener (said opener being somewhat damaged). We took the bottle to the reception, explaining our situation in our broken french and the kind staff helped us get access to our wine by providing a proper functioning wine opener. We asked what said opener is called in french, and learned it is called a "lemonadier". When we looked confused, she explained in broken English that it's like a tool to help you get your lemonade; and I suppose it is, because the tool also has a bottle opener for lemonade, in addition to the corkscrew. It was amusing though to consider that the French use a tool for opening lemonade bottles to also open wine bottles. If you've ever used such a tool, it's likely you've used it way more often to open a wine bottle. But sure, it's a tool for opening lemonade bottles. ¯_(ツ)_/¯