28th– June 2012 Last night it rained for about five minutes and that was it! Blue sky and sun the next day and our first port of call was Roquefort-sur-Soulzon where the Roquefort cheese comes from. (We do have a story that on a previous travel through France we found a place called Roquefort and duly bought the cheese etc....before one of the locals kindly informed us that it was the wrong Roquefort and that there are eight Roqueforts in France!!) We arrived just as there was a lorry traffic jam with all the lorries loading up from the various outlet cellars. Walked back down through the village and visited one of the Combalou caves where the cheese is matured for a minimum of three months. The ripening cellars lie at the tip of ... read more

18thJune 2012 – 23rd June 2012 After a thunderstorm last night and a strange bird that sort of sang all night long we awoke to a fine sunny day. Nearly ran over a pair of lagartos that were lazing in the road, but apart from that, an uneventful journey on the twisty N322 until we reached Balazote, where we picked up some nice straight roman roads and drove across the huge plains of wheat, olive trees and grapevines. Stopped at Tarazona de la Mancha to find a PO and get some shopping and found it to be a very pleasant place, with all roads leading to a central square and church and surrounded by wooden balconied buildings with arches underneath. We stopped at a campsite in Venta de la Contreras, which was down a ... read more

June 10th 2012 – June 13th2012 We left the house about 2.00pm (after I had done the washing and got it dried!!) and then had a fairly short hop to a campsite we have stayed on before at La Herradura. Its a very leafy campsite, about two minutes from the sea and usually has a few cats wandering about! The showers are not that good (ie can be cold water!) and the beach is more like a dirt track than sand but we like it there! Spain were also playing Italy at 6.00pm that evening so we wandered along to the open air bar for drinks and free tapas and watched the football whilst listening to the waves crashing....... A good evening although Spain only managed a 1-1 draw! (70 miles) The next day we drove ... read more

EL ROCIO It is impossible to describe the Romeria at El Rocio to anyone who hasn’t been here, as the whole experience is completely overwhelming! If you visit any other time of year other than Pentecost, El Rocio is a large village designed on a grid system town in the Donana National Park, with a huge Church that stands next to the lake where you can see flamingos and other birds. All the unpaved streets are very wide and made of sand, reminiscent of a wild-west ghost town in America, with large empty buildings with rails outside to tie up horses. However, at Pentecost (7 weeks after Easter), El Rocio bursts into life, with approx 90 Hermandads (Church Brotherhoods) with up to 1 million people descend on the village on their annual pilgrimage. This dates back ... read more

MALTA Strictly speaking, this isn’t our first trip of 2012 as we were lucky enough to have 3 weeks in Spain in February. The weather there was glorious and we met up with friends and spent a lot of the time walking in the mountains and socialising. We had hired a car as well so were able to go to the lakes and El Chorro and at last did a Field Club walk where we found the Arab Steps – an old set of steps cut into a mountain, which was built as an escape route for the Moors when they conquered Andalucia. Fantastic views, as there is on most of the walks we do in Spain...... Anyway, our first glimpse of Malta from the plane was very clear and we were able to pick out ... read more