Lumière

Light ... you can see why the group of painters known as the fauves loved Collioure. On a sunny early spring day, the light is just amazing, and as you can see, it's an outrageously pretty town. We spent most of the day just strolling around taking photos. At one point, after I'd filled up one SD card and started on another, it occurred to me that if you lived in Collioure, you'd have an inexhaustible supply of blip material. In the extremely unlikely event that you got bored with the view of the beach and the harbour, you could take a photo of a different building every day for a year and not get tired of them. See my spare blip.

We haven't been to Collioure for many years, though we have happy memories of one of our early camping holidays at a site on a cliff between Collioure and Argelès. I think it was the year we arrived at the site, unpacked everything, put the tent up, and realised we'd left the groundsheet and air mattresses at home.

For once we'd carefully researched restaurants for lunch before we left home. We're not usually as organised as this. Every single one on our shortlist was closed for winter. Still, with the help of the smartphone and TripAdvisor, we found Casa Leon, where we had a pleasant Catalan lunch. I enjoyed seeing the three smart Spanish ladies at the next table order one starter between them and all share from the same plate. This is so typically Spanish; French people never do this!

After lunch we visited Collioure's museum of modern art, which was extremely underwhelming and almost worth the 2 euros it cost to go in. If you're going to visit an art museum around here, better make it the one in Céret. More strolling in the sun along with crowds of other happy, relaxed people -- it must be a popular day out from Perpignan -- and then home. Tired now -- I'll do a Flickr set of some of my other photos, but not till tomorrow.

PS I sneaked some vines into this blip.