Considering the view

First, thank you everyone for your kind wishes and comments on my blipday ... first row of the first page of Popular, which is a rare achievement for me! Sorry I'm not keeping up with comments, too much else to do ...

Up and out by 9:30, we had to walk quite a way to find a cafe open that early on a Sunday. We ended up at the open-air churreria for our Andalusian breakfast of champions: freshly squeezed orange juice, cafe con leche, toast with smashed tomatoes, salt and olive oil. Then we went on a bit of a stroll along the seafront to see what had changed, before our first appointment of the day.

This is the view from the little house we looked at. Very nice! It would be perfect for Mystère, if less so for us. We did like the house a lot, set in its own walled garden surrounded by orchards of chirimoyas and mangoes. But one of our criteria is that it has to be an easy 20-30 minute walk from the town centre. This is a kilometre and a half up a steep concrete and gravel track from the outskirts of Salobreña (the town in the distance). Still, definitely a possibility if we don't find anything else.

From there we drove to our favourite beach, Cantarrijan. We had taken the precaution of booking a table at the usual restaurant, but had forgotten that the summer system of being required to park at the top of the cliff and take a minibus down still applies. The car park was packed, with many cars parked along the hard shoulder of the road as well, but we did find a space in the overspill car park before queuing for the bus. 

We are so used to this beach in the winter that it was quite a shock to see it so crowded, with a very different demographic. Officially it's a nudist beach, but you can take your clothes off or not, as you wish. In winter it's mostly elderly naked Germans and other northern Europeans. Now, it's mostly Spanish people, young to middle-aged, in bikinis or shorts. The nudists, it turned out, had mostly migrated to the smaller bit of beach beyond a rocky outcrop. Anyway, the water was soupily warm, warmer than the swimming pool at home. No need to swim, I just floated around in it for half an hour -- lovely.

This evening we met R and D at their favourite bar. It was good to catch up with them. When we last met, having arrived in Spain on the eve of the first lockdown they'd managed to sort out their official residence permits, very quickly in the circumstances, and since then they have moved, sold their flat in the UK, and bought a flat here -- in the same block as guiri and F, as it happens. When we told them about the house we'd looked at, R suggested we should get a couple of electric scooters, then we could whiz up and down the hill with ease. An interesting thought!