5th March 2017. Casares, Spain.

The weather was supposed to change for the better on Sunday and it did brighten up enough to walk into the town of Casares where we celebrated Darren’s birthday.  The walk in was lovely, unfortunately the path went down into the valley (crossing a little stream via a mediaeval bridge) before going back up the other side of the mountain, it was a long old hike up hill to the Church where we caught our breath while we looked down on the Griffon Vultures flying around the valley beneath us.  We were high up in the cloud again and I kept getting droplets of water on the lens of my camera.

On the way back down from the view point we passed a little cafe, the door was open but I couldn’t decided whether the cafe was open.  I was thrilled to be able to ask the man standing by the counter whether  the cafe was open, in Spanish.  He was pleased to have us in there and it was nice to sit and drink coffee and eat ice cream (haven’t done that in a long time) out of the drizzle.

We walked to another view point where a man noticed the Canadian flag on my coat, he was Canadian and he started chatting to us, apparently he and his friends come out every year for 3 months to play golf.  I assume he must be a bit of a chatterbox because his friends carried on walking so he had to rush to catch up with them.

We followed in their footsteps down the slippery cobbled street and on the way I spied a pretty freesia growing on a wall.  I’ve never seen one growing before.  Freesias are my Mum’s favourite flower because when she went to her first work’s dance two of her colleagues, Tony (who became her first husband and my Dad) and Rita, bought her her first corsage and it had freesias in it.

After I’d finished photographing the freesia we carried on walking into the town square where we stopped for lunch.

Some Danish people at the table next to us asked whether we knew where the shop was that sold cheap chocolate, unfortunately no one in the restaurant knew where it was, I hope they eventually found it.

We started to make our way out of town, stopping to read a information board where a Dutch lady started talking to us, she was on a walking holiday but all the other people on the trip were Spanish so she was taking the opportunity to be able to chat to someone in a language she understood.  It was a day of people rushing off, she suddenly noticed that her walking party had all walked off so she had to jog after them.

We walked back to the van via the valley path and celebrated the rest of Darren’s birthday watching films that our son Morgan had supplied us with.