Our first real adventure out (other than to the village) was to Montblanc (not to be confused with Mont Blanc. There were no pens or Toblerones here.) It is a beautiful medieval town, which answered yesterday’s question as to whether they had a medieval period here. They did. They have castles and walled cities and […]
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Yesterday I mentioned that we were not overlooked, well we are sort of, by an entire village. The village of el Vilosell is a small medieval village perched atop a hill. I say medieval, I’m not even sure that Spain had a medieval period did it? History was never my strong suit at school. I […]
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The next morning, after a bread intensive breakfast, we headed out to the villa. To get out of the car park we had to pull up to a console and go through this familiar routine; lower the window, try an type in a pass code, realise that you have misjudged the distance, move a bit […]
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Billboa has some amazing buildings, most of them built in the last 30 years. It also has some pointless ones. Here is a quick history lesson. Back in the 1990’s the Basque government managed to persuade the Guggenheim foundation to build a new museum in Bilbao on some reclaimed industrial waste land and since then […]
Read More →One thing Karen is obsessed with is the weather. Before we came out she was checking the weather here to decide what to wear. Now we are here, she is even worse. Every night we turn on the telly to check the weather on at least two channels (but she does prefer the weather on […]
Read More →The plane journey was pretty uneventful (except for the party of school kids behind me kicking my seat). As we landed I got my first sight of Bilbao Airport. It’s certainly striking. Whereas most airports have gone for the glass and metal look, Bilbao has gone for white concrete and glass. But a mainly concrete. […]
Read More →Hey blog lovers we are back on our hols! Its been a long 4 months since our trip to Copenhagen but we are back destroying the environment with a trip to Bilbao. This is actually a present from my parents and my sister Nikki, for Karen’s birthday. If you remember last September we all went […]
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When I saw the original Star Wars film aged 7 I nearly wet myself in the cinema with excitement. 40 years later watching The Last Jedi I nearly wet myself again; but that was mainly due to the length of the film and a middle aged prostate. But I was still grinning like a 7 […]
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In our guidebook there were a lot of things not to do in Copenhagen. Walk into cycle lanes, complement the Swedes too much (see yesterdays blog) and jay walk. Jaywalking is not illegal like it is in some states in America, but they are very code compliant here. And you stray into a cycle lane […]
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The Danes really do like their chairs. I mean they are seriously obsessed. In our apartment there are pictures of chairs on the walls; in the shops you can buy mini models of chairs and get this, at the the table where I sit and do my blogging in our apartment, you guessed it, there’s […]
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After arriving in Copenhagen and checking into our accomodation, the next thing we needed was food. A place that had been recommended to Karen (and our host confirmed this) was a place called Paper Island. My immediate thought was paper mache island, so like the Tracey Island which Anthea Turner made all those years ago […]
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So the journey began this morning at 4:30. We were so worried about over sleeping we set 3 alarms, 2 using alarm clocks we have never used before, so we then spent 5 minutes working out how to turn them off. By 4:45 we were in the car and off to the airport. Luckily, Storm […]
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It’s been a long 3 months since our last holiday (ok, 12 weeks to be precise). Work has been a bit thin on the ground (graphene thin) so my longest journey lately has been to Ormskirk Market (0.7 miles) so I am getting itchy feet to travel somewhere. I have been getting my travel fix […]
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As well as eating and drinking and generally celebrating Nik’s half century, we have had a couple of days out as well, some which didn’t even involve going to a supermarket. Yesterday we went to the seaside resort of Tossa de Mar (Tossa by the Sea) and it didn’t matter how long we were there, […]
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We were hit by this bank holiday lark before, back in May. On our first night in Colmenar we ended up getting our first evening meal from the local garage. Luckily, this time we still had most food and drink groups in (with us having doubled up), but we were running low on bread and […]
Read More →This weekend was the main focus of Nik’s holiday celebrations (but her birthday is actually on Tuesday). Her friends Helen and Kevin and Anne and John arrived at Saturday lunchtime. It began raining. A lot. In fact it rained so much that we now have a water hazard on the 8th hole of our golf […]
Read More →We headed off to Girona for the big shop. We sort of had a rough idea where we were going, and with it being a big shop we took two cars. Our plan (which was decided at the planning meeting last week) was to have a light lunch at the cafe at Carrefour, so we […]
Read More →Our villa was at the end of a dirt track, past a farm, through a field of corn and it’s there. Over the years we have stayed in a range of villas; Villa Wow, Villa Hollywood and now Villa Rustica. This is very different to our previous accomodation. Imagine a barn conversion combined with a […]
Read More →We eventually took off and had a fairly uneventful flight (unlike last time). There were some noisy, if not offensive women on the flight. I was guessing they were just speaking so loud as their ears hadn’t popped yet, so I slipped on my noise cancelling headphones to drown them out, then wished I had […]
Read More →Nothing quite like half a night’s sleep to start a holiday is there? After approximately three hours sleep the alarm woke us ready to set off on our latest adventure. There was no chance of us over sleeping as we were woken half an hour before our alarm by a couple having a blazing row […]
Read More →Greetings holiday blog lovers. Well you will be glad to know that after three and half long, hard months, I can say goodbye to work and get on with what I do best. Holidays. On Friday, we are heading off the Spain for my sister Nikki’s birthday. Now I’m too much of a gentleman to […]
Read More →The joy of coming on holiday to Spain with a Spaniard is that you never really have to worry about conversations. I mean if Tibu wasn’t here, I’d make a good attempt, but think about it, if you were a Spaniard what would you rather hear; a fluent native speaker, or an Englishman making a […]
Read More →Today, it rained. We knew it was coming so last night over dinner we tried to decide what to do that was dry. We started with the idea of going to Nerja to the caves, but we didn’t want to spend another day in the car going down crazy roads (see blog here about that). […]
Read More →Whenever we go out there is a constant battle between the Tom Tom and Google maps. Today we wanted to go to Colmares. This is a little town right on top of a hill that directly faces us in our villa. In the evening, when the sun catches it, it reflects the sun with a […]
Read More →The other day we went to El Torcal, which is an amazing range of limestone rocks that have been eroded by the wind over time. Rachel and Tibu’s friend had been and said that the easy route was quite flat, so we thought perfect; parent friendly. The journey up there was the usual rollercoaster ride […]
Read More →The other day we headed off to Ronda (the one in Andalusia, not the one in Wales) for the day. We decided to head off early and had breakfast en route. There are quite a few services off the motorways here, but unlike the chains we have in the UK, they are quite often small […]
Read More →Some of you will be painfully aware that I did a sprint triathlon last month, as I keep on banging on about it. Even with less training than my first outing last August, I still managed to knock 5 minutes off my time. However when I got the break down I realised that was gained […]
Read More →The thing about a villa holiday is that you do spend a lot of time, well, at the villa. Some may think this a bit boring compared to hairing around America or eating your way around Europe, but you can make your own entertainment; well the parents can anyway. They have been laying new water […]
Read More →Eventually we got to do “The Big Shop”. For some, their first drink in a sun lounger is the start of their holiday; for others it’s their first meal sat under the stars waiting expectantly to find out what bizarre local liquor the restaurant will offer you as the digestif; for us it’s spending two […]
Read More →We left baggage reclaim (with all 7 bags) and an hour later we were heading off to the villa in our hire cars. The villa is just outside of Colmenar and is about 40 minutes from Malaga airport. We had looked at the place many times on Google maps before, but one thing you don’t […]
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