A Dance of Cranes

It was such a gorgeous day, cold and sunshiney, and Mike had finished our tax returns and I had no Zoom meetings, decided to get out for a walk. We drove to Granja, another town in our Concelho, and out along a rough road towards Spain. Suddenly, cranes! 

About thirty of them on one side of the road, and loads more on the other. Hundreds, maybe more, of these large birds, about a metre high, spend the winter in this area, and we have seen them, but never this close - they fly off at the first sign of humans. But my camera was on the back seat...

And then, more. And more. The above was my first photo, a clearer extra, but I loved the light in the first one. And another of them flying off, as they inevitably did.

We were walking alongside a property of almost a thousand hectares, famous for raising the bulls for bullfighting. Mike was more fascinated with the bulls, which looked exactly like the billboards in Spain, and who raised their heads to study us carefully, very unlike normal cattle. I just hoped the fences were good.

We ended up in the small town of Valencia de Mombuey, in Spain, at a restaurant that I'd promised to return to one day, after the owner rescued us and our four young visitors, see here.  I asked the young guy serving us whether he was the son of that man, no, it was under new management. The food was superb, definitely need to go back one day, again.

Gratefuls:
- a really special day
- seeing so many cranes
- a new nightly routine