I love a good hotel. And yet as I get older, I find myself more and more  drawn to the off beat and the one-off. Here in Pezenas, Hotel de Vigniamont is a prime example of the latter. While not a hotel in the American sense of the word, it’s a chambre d’hote, or bed and breakfast, set in a quaint 17th century hôtel particulier, an old mansion. You enter through a vine-draped door to a cool, central courtyard marked by strikingly dramatic arches. A stone staircase showing the wear of centuries winds its way up to five spacious suites and a roof terrace with chaise lounges. The individually designed rooms are immensely comfortable, stylish, and include the kind of small, thoughtful touches you’d expect from staying with friends. But best of all is the bubbly hostess, Babette. Delightfully friendly, she’s enthusiastic about both her home and her town.
The Canal du Midi is considered one of greatest construction works of the 17th century. It spans 150 miles from the city of Toulouse to Lake Thau, near the Mediterranean, and links with the Canal de Garonne to join the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea in a grand feat of imperial engineering. Curiously the canal never quite lived up to its intended purpose, which was to transport goods on barges pulled along by horses. The arrival of the railroad put paid to that. Now used primarily for recreation and river tourism, the towpaths make for particularly good bike lanes. Today, I boarded a private barge in Carcassonne – not the one pictured above, thank you very much – and spent a few languorous hours cruising through the double leaf locks at a snail’s pace. The wine flowed freely, a memorable lunch was served (more on that later), and plane trees framed every idyllic view. Though the manual opening of the sluices and lock gates has long ago been replaced by electrification, the collection of tolls remains refreshingly antediluvian: each lock has its own local keeper, who won’t let you pass until you pay up.
