my food mantra

good eating

rohan does the titles and he isnt here

we are now in san sebastian, very near the end. i thought i would try to blog some photos though as we are soooo behind.

last night we decided to try and visit as many pinxtos bars as we could manage as it is our last weekend offically on hols...needless to say we were sad and sorry shells of our former selves thismorning, but we dragged our sorry selves out of bed to find it was the most stunning day - it was cold (19 degrees) but so sunny and San Sebastian was glowing in it. i think i am burnt even!


i have noticed though that every second person in SS is under the age of two, or a dog. i was concerned that it was my biological clock going out of control but i checked with rohan and he agreed that yes, there was definitely a disproportionate amount of children around. phew. we spend most of the day watching waves. actually we have spent most of the last few weeks watching waves... no comment.


but from alicante....we drove through acres of disused polytunnels to Granada. well, not actually through them, but alongside.


We managed to arrive in Granada for the España Day long weekend - which meant that the Alhambra (what you go to see) was booked out. we could see the gardens but that was all...rohan was pretty dissapointed that we were going to spend an arvo looking at gardens, but he perked up when it turned out we could see a bit of the battlements and in the end it wasnt a bad way to spend an arvo.

bread at the España Day festivities...next to this was slabs of empanadas and next to them every type of cheesecake imaginable...heaven for some, dangerous for me.

Gorgeous Granada

This was taken from the ´Generalife´ the sultans summer gardens which i thought were stunning

Gardens of the Alhambra



roof of the hammam

dont know why but i dont mind this photo...hair obviously not a success story of the trip.

The Alhambra

We then went to Cordoba, which we really liked, but for some reason didnt take any photos of? highlight was the mosque that the christian crusaders tried to turn into a cathedral.

We watched a rugby semi-final there (Argentina/France i think)...well, i cringed my way through it....what a brutual game rugby union is... not sure how i am going to go being an east coast girl.

Next was Sevilla, which was all sunlight, jasmine, palm trees and orange groves.

The stunning España Plaza

part of the cathedral of Sevilla - it is the third largest in the world.

Sastisfied customers - those are olive pips left on the plate


Then it was onto Portugal. Driving into Portugal was a bit like coming home for us. Red dirt, stringybark gumtrees and wide open beaches with bugger all people on them. Rohan got a little trigger happy with the camera so i have just picked out a few shots of the beautiful beaches.

We went for a swim here one day...while we were swimming a lone bagspipeman (?) started playing on the cliff top...it made me quite homesick and wistful...but then a man got out of the surf completely naked! so that changed the mood somewhat.

another beautiful beach that we stopped at for lunch and a swim on our way to Lisbon. there was a version of this photo with me in it, but i just ruined it.

map of portugals once mighty empire, taken from great height.

me at great height with lisbon's golden gate in background.

streets of lisbon - beautiful tiled and crumbly pastel painted buildings

rohan and lisbon

i just liked this shot - we never found out what the story with the cathedral was

we were walking the streets seemingly randomly until we came to this little bar perched in the hills overlooking the bay with lots of cool looking people hanging out... we decided to have a beer and wait for the sun to set with them.

sun setting over lisbon

i forgot to mention in my last post that rohan ate a whole chicken the other day.
it was grilled, not raw, but still...a whole chicken.

beginning of the end

it had to happen.
rohan has just booked our boat back to england : (
to be fair, we are both getting a lil travel weary...me especially as i have been sick as a dog the last few days (with the flu -i'm producing impressive amounts of phlegm) but the sun and sea has helped.
we have travelled from southern portugal to the northern town of Porto.
The weather seems to be reflecting our mood and has gone from sunshiny, happy weather in the south to be misty, cooler and moody up here. it makes Porto seem all mysterious and melancholy. i like it.
we have been having a hard time thinking of Portugal in a historical sense as alot of it seems to be just like Oz, but here in Porto, walking down the narrow streets bordered by ramshackle, rundown houses on a drizzly day like today you feel like you are stepping back into the middle ages.

we have booked a ferry from Bilboa, Spain so we dont have to drive like crazy people on motorways to calais to make our semi-self imposed deadline of Nov 1....its a bit more expensive but when you take into account petrol/tolls/two extra days on the road it isnt too bad.

a/r

it´s summer in spain ; )

hallelujah. after what? 8 weeks or so on the road we finally arrived. ..at our first (DCC rated) 5* caravan park.

of course, it doesnt meet our (rather stringent by now) 5 star requirements. in fact, rohan has said that in his book the site is down to 1/2 a star!! but then rohans rating system is largely based by whether the toilets have seats or not (these dont).

and although the wine comes with a napkin folded around it in the ice bucket at the restaurant, there are a few faults at the more practical end of the services spectrum ...

1/ (its about the toilets again sorry - we try not to let all our conversations degenerate into the merits and (moreoften) demerits of toilet blocks past and present, but it happens. ) but yes point 1. toilet paper outside of the toilet block. difficult when you forget and difficult to figure out how much to take when there are other people hanging around the dispenser. easily a 1/2 star off.

2/ no free drinking water. every tap has a big cup with a bigger cross through it. on our evening walk around the campsite (yes, yes it is hard not to fall into the retiree pace of life) we found some taps without the sign - by this time i was dying of thirst so had a sip...the water is like brine. so we have had to survive on our wine and shnapps, which thismorning did not sit to well with the toddlers who woke up early and played outside our tent - but they're so cute, who can be angry.

3/ no self service washing machines and signs leading to the lavederia that actually lead to a construction site

4/ not being able to chose your campsite. it is our favourite pasttime to trawl slowly through the campsite searching for the penultimate site (close(but not too close) to amenities, view, sun/shade, flat (especially important to rohan who seems to think he detect the slightest of slopes),etc)


i think thats it and to be fair, the site was quite beautiful.

our home at the end of our street


The restaurant



5* toilet block (supposedly)

one of the two swimming pools

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but now, back to the holiday proper. when i left off last time, we were actually in Annecy - in the lower French Alps...it was a bit of a desperation stop as we couldnt find any hotels with parking in Geneva but it was one of our nicer desperation stops.Annecy.

From there we pretty much legged it to the coast along the Route Napoleon - stopping at a gorge the Lonely Planet rated and driving through the (harvested) lavender fields of Provence along the way.

Rohan and the gorgeous gorge

Aha! some sun on the coast near marseilles...and our triumphant return to camping after a week in low star hotels.A view from the campsite. We kept heading west at this point, taking in a bit of Aix-on-Provence, Arles and the Rhone delta along the way. Again the weather was not great..so i dont think we saw southern france at its best - we will have to come back...also not many photos because the light wasnt right...on the way to spain we passed through another gorge that we werent expecting (tricksy tom) with even narrower roads with a even bigger drop on the other side. Still the beamer is going strong...work horse that it is.We stayed on the Costa Brava for a bit and did a bit of a Dali tour, stopping in at his summer home town, Cadaques ¿above = cant get the paragraphs to work all of a suddenª argh my keyboard has gone crazy? and the Dali theatre in Figueres which was as surreal as you would expectRohan being arty ¿Dali inspired?Rohan and his new little friend at our campsite in Costa Brava.We also spent a (too brief) time in Girona = here the imposing cathedral (i still cant find the dash, but have found the paragraphs).

Rohan went for a dive off the coast of LÉstartit while i floudered around trying to snorkel (luckily i was by myself so there was noone to notice me - my wetsuit was too short (as opposed to too small) and i was too bouyant).

Before you knew it, it was time to head to Barcelona where we had a few sunfilled days enjoying the Gaudi architecture and the rest of the city. We both thought Barcelona is somewhere we could live if our spanish or castellano was a bit better.

the most visited construction site in the world. i suffered a bit from crowd rage at this point and had to sit in a corner by myself while rohan took photos.

Casa Milla (at this point i got a ´so what is this all about then´ from Rohan in a ´do we really have to go to another museum/walk up stairs´ kind of way, but once we got to the top i couldnt stop him taking photos.

the dynamic markets in Barcelona, not unlike (and i am not joking) Adelaide Central Markets

Candles in the cathedral

Me attempting to be arty

the end of sesame street?!

washing.

After Barcelona we headed to Granada, stopping at my dads friend Frans´ villa along the way. It was the perfect place to chill out before continuing the tour so muchos gracias to Frans and Monique for having us.

a long way down - hiking around the mountains near Alicante.

We are now in Seville and have really enjoyed Andalucia....overdoing it a bit on the cerveca and tapas but thats ok.

ains and roh

xxx