After a week of preparation and interruptions and after packing the dogs off to the 'Seacrest Pet Hotel', we finally left home on Sunday 16th October around midday.
Himself drove some 2,600 miles in all. We managed five ferry crossings, all but the last as calm as a mill pond, visited family and friends in England and new family in Ireland where we were made thoroughly welcome and would have loved to have stayed longer and all in all had a perfectly wonderful safari.
With hind sight though, we should have taken two or three days longer to complete the journey back from Ireland to Spain as we arrived home on Friday 5th November, after picking up the dogs from their restful stay in Nerja, utterly exhausted and we really needed far more time than we had allowed to be with our family and friends.
Himself has drunk the Guiness where it tastes as it was meant to taste, we've enjoyed the home grown Aberdeen Angus steak and the tasty, floury fresh home farm potatoes, tasted the pocheen, savoured the 'heavy air' and wondered at the green of the fields and trees and the watery sun, the quiet and peace of the place and how it must have been to grow up there in Ireland.
I fell in love with our sturdy, cosy, compact, campervan and could quite easily become an 'old age traveller'. The nomadic life is extremely addictive.
We have slept warmly and well in a private driveway level with the pavement when the night time temperature fell to 3ยบ, in a layby opposite a chicken and kebab shop, by the roadside in a newish housing area as well as on a very pretty, country campsite and on a not so pretty, seaside camp site.
Now, a few days later, we are ready to begin the journey all over again.....wishful thinking that is, I am sorry to say.
Back home...... it was back to work, cleaning downstairs after a family of seven who left the house on the same morning as us and left us with a mountain of washing too and then, we still have all the washing from the villa that there wasn't time to sort out before we left. Meeting and Greeting yet another French couple I wondered where oh where have all our British holidaymakers been holidaying? There havn't been many coming here this year. Again this afternoon, at the villa, we are expecting to greet a couple coming from Brittany who are holidaying for a week here.
At least the sun is shining and the wind has dropped and the temperature rising again after all the rain that fell whilst we were away.
and so life goes on.........
