I've had a holiday!

So now I'm home with 1500+ photos to sort out, and a jungle in the veg patch. It's cold and drizzly and I've only gone and caught a cold so I'm not doing very much. Even sorting through photos is taking twice as long as my brain has turned to mush.

Here are some photos that sort of sum up my holiday. In good time I will post more, obviously, and probably put some into albums which I'll share. All in all we have had a fantastic time, could have done with a little less breeze/more warmth at times but having come home to about 12C, I am now thinking fondly of those 'cold' days in Spain when the temps dropped to about 17/18C!

Mandy goes bug hunting in SW France

Crosses the Pyrenees into Spain

Spanish bugs come hunting for Mandy (it's some kind of chafer beetle)

Mandy dips her toes into the Med and squeals with the cold

But does manage to have a dip in the hotel pool; first swim since 2000!!!

The Moorhen Lady meets her Spanish cousin, the Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio porphyrio)

Then visits a tropical bird and butterfly park and makes a new BFF

It really didn't want to get off me and pecked me and shrieked whenever I tried to get it
onto my fingers; I got snuggled for about 15 minutes before it finally had enough :-)

Unfortunately our car decided to play up and decided that, although it had crossed the Pyrenees at over 1600m, it would overheat every time we tried to climb a mini mountain after that. It had done this once before in the Basque Country 18 months ago, but after that holiday the garage could find no fault so we had forgotten about it, thinking it was one of those one-off things. Well it started again to the point that we could not trust it one bit, so had to do some hurried rearranging of the last 3 days of our holiday, as the two nights to be spent in a Casa Rurale up high in the mountains was not going to happen! So we stayed on longer in Roses on the coast and came home via the long and boring autoroute going from the Med coast to the Atlantic at Bordeaux then back up via a last night in La Rochelle.

The car is now history and we'll be looking for something more reliable. In the meantime, there are no mountains here, so it works fine....