Our travel arrangements however were chaotic. Thank heavens we could put Covid behind us. It died out at the beginning of the year and the lockdowns are beginning to be considered to be a bad thing. However, travel arrangements were thrown out as they had sacked too many of their staff and could not replace them, so there was chaos at the airports. We booked up in February with BA to fly from Heathrow at a good rate. However, a fortnight before we were due to fly we has an email from BA that the outward flight has been cancelled and we must re-book. This proved impossible as they created ridiculous rates in the £150 to £200 range, instead about £60.  What made it worse was when I tried to reclaim the money, I found I had cancelled the whole trip, so we had to re-book out and back with easyJet. Luckily we were able to do this at a good rate, but it meant flying from Gatwick, which meant paying nearly £100 to the taxi on the way out and Uber on the way back.

We booked a mini-cab to take us out which costs just over £90 to Gatwick, but then the Special Assistance worked well – they had a splendid waiting lounge in the departure hall. The only problem was at Toulouse where I had to get down the steps to leave the plane but I managed quite easily. But then they whisked us on one of their special trains right past everyone and we got through very quickly and found that our language was waiting for us – had they treated our luggage specially?

The only problem was that Robert had misread our arrival times and rang to say he would be half an hour or an hour late, but we found a good  seat in the deserted arrivals hall until he eventually turned up with a wheel chair, and we then had a good journey back to the Chateau, though the Albi motorway was closed and we had to take the old road through the suburbs of Toulouse, which was terribly long compared to the motorway journey which only seems to be a couple of minutes