The Prologue

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Until Departure

Dear Bo & Dud,

A belated Happy New Year to you both and welcome to our travel blog. Howard has been busy researching blogs since the arrival of the new laptop. It is going to be our way of keeping in touch while on our travels.

My first job on returning to work after the holiday was to put in a request for a year’s unpaid leave. I am reliably informed by personnel, sorry H.R. (Human Resources!!) that I am entitled to take a ‘career break’ - at my age this made me giggle somewhat. Anyway call it what you like the die is cast and I am on track to take a break for the next academic year, July 07 returning to work September 08.

We took a fly away break the first week in January to research camp sites in Spain. The break was a good one, Howard booked everything over the internet, hotel, flight, insurance and car hire - couldn’t fault anything. The camp site experience was interesting ….. we have decided that we want to try to get into Spain from about November and stay until the end of January/February. As we’ve never used camp sites in Spain before we thought we better have a look at some. The general set up appears to be intimate and compact but we have found one that we like the look of, Torre del Mar, which is about 25 miles up the coast from Malaga and on the sea front at the edge of town.


One day we travelled up to Almeria, we took a holiday here a few years ago and we were horrified at the change that has taken place. This is the area where all the fruit and veg for our supermarkets is grown so there are acres and acres of greenhouses - now I don’t want you to think lovely, neat, glass houses, no I want you to think of the Spaniard who has a few hectares to spare and so up go the structures and the plastic. It was our intention to look at a couple of sites, the first one was extremely good, well set out and with all the facilities we need for a long stay but the road down to the site was a wall of plastic on both sides of the road - not nice, and not for us.

We returned to Torre del Mar a couple of days later and were shown around the site by the lovely Carmen. She speaks no English and of course our Spanish is non existent - we did however realise how good our French is. We were able to speak to some long term residents and the reports were all good, supermarket near by, local buses, good walking area and most of all the weather.




So now the planning can begin. We had a brain storm (or should it be thought shower?) last weekend and now have a long list of things to do. I hope to give you a monthly update of our preparations in progress. It will also help me get used to the idea of keeping a journal.


Love to you both

Howard & Hilda

P.S. Howard says thank you for the interesting Christmas gift. I didn’t know you could still get a pattern for Aran socks. I must say, you’ve turned the heel beautifully.

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