Everything stops for tea

A six-hour drive was very pleasantly interrupted by, of all things, a cream tea in a giant wooden teapot (see extra). The teapot started life as a garden shed in Scotland. Last year it was carefully dismantled, every piece numbered, and reconstructed on the edge of an industrial estate near Lannemezan in south-west France. The cakes are home-made, as are the tea cosies, the tea is from Yorkshire, and the clotted cream imported from Cornwall. Delicious! When we go on long journeys we have taken to heading off the motorway for lunch -- much better than stopping at a service station. This was perhaps a tad too far -- it added about an hour onto the journey -- but ever since I stumbled across it on Facebook I knew we had to pay a visit the next time we went to northern Spain.

So from there, it was en route to paradise on earth, aka the Basque country. Actually we are just over the border, in Cantabria -- our house-swap in Durango fell through, so we quickly booked an AirBnB apartment in Castro Urdiales, a place of which we knew nothing. However, it looks very promising. 

We were knackered by the time we got here, but after a little rest we summoned the energy to go and buy some food and then have a paseo and tapas in town. The port is beautiful and will certainly be blipped. Like every Spanish town at sundown, it was buzzing with people strolling, chatting, and sitting in bars. We restricted ourselves to a modest glass of txakoli and a tapa each and then went back to the apartment and dined on the left-over roast chicken and salad we'd brought with us -- at the very Spanish hour of 10:30, hence this late blip.