Travel Destination - Carcassonne, France

We dined more modestly the following evening, in a boÎte called l'Ostal des Troubadours, a tiny Gypsy café on the main square in Carcassone. The tables were cheek-by-jowel but the cassoulet was rich and fragrant, the local French wine was cheap and, beside us, a small fenestration through three feet of hewn stone looked out onto the castle keep.

In a corner of the room, a classically-trained guitarist entertained. We applauded enthusiastically and our appreciation did not go unnoticed; ours was the first table he visited with outstretched hat when his set ended. He was replaced by a boozy singer-guitarist who announced in heavily accented French that he was a purveyor of Irish love ballads, then blithely launched into Leonard Cohen's Sisters of Mercy.

In the morning there was a wedding in the cathedral for us to watch from our private lookout onto the square and we were late for service in Hotel de la Cite's breakfast room. The staff cheerfully set a solitary table for us outdoors beside the deserted swimming pool and served us croissants, brioche, boiled eggs, fresh orange juice and café au laît on starched linen and silver.

We wore our straw hats against the sun. A scented breeze riffled the dazzling white table cloth. We were starring, fantastically, in our own movie, a romance that Halliburton might have written had he lived long enough to acquire a taste for the more sybaritic pleasures of travel. Poor Richard, instead, died trying to cross the China sea in a leaky junk, on the eve of World War 2. He was on his way to San Francisco, creating another adventure, and he vanished without a trace. He wasn't yet forty. But he'd made that enchanted moment in Carcassonne possible for us, a gift for which I'll always be grateful.

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