Out and about

The Thursday walk was in Salobreña today. It was largely one I've done before -- a quite boring, almost entirely flat route through orchards of chirimoyas, avocados, and Japanese medlars. "About two hours," said Helen. But that's what she said last week. 

It was a first opportunity for a catch-up with Irish friend C, last seen a year ago. Since then, she's sold her house in France and bought one in Salobreña.  Chatting away, we soon fell far behind the main part of the group -- even further than last week's laggards. We did catch up every now and then, and were joined by other laggards for more general chat.

After about an hour and a half we reached the obligatory "If you want a shortcut back, this is it" point. We lost nearly half the large group at this point. As we progressed C and I were chatting with Finn Sinikka and local guy Julián. Julián kept stopping to point out interesting features of the landscape and places of historical or personal interest, so we soon fell so far behind that the others were completely out of sight. Not a problem, Julián devised his own route back to the bar where we'd parked the cars. We never did catch up and eventually made it three hours after setting off. The others were already installed but to our surprise had only been there about ten minutes. They'd taken a completely different route back, but it didn't look longer. Stats: about 11 km, very little climbing, 3 hours.

After more chat in the bar, it was after 2:30 by the time we got home, so lunch was at the very Spanish hour of 3:30. S barbecued some sausages but sadly it was too windy to sit on the terrace. Afterwards I retrieved the dough that had been sitting in the fridge since 7:30 yesterday evening and made a sourdough loaf (extra). The oven here certainly gives better results than my own. Though the strong flour you can buy in Spain could also be a factor. We just had some, still slightly warm, with lashings of butter. Delicious!