We’re on the Move, Baby.

We’ve finally left El P! All our new chums had left and we managed to catch up briefly with friends from previous years, so we felt it was time to move on, after our planned 6 weeks of 'no travel'.

We had a real blast in Sevilla last weekend, showing Andy and Susan from Glasgow all our favourite haunts and of course finding some new ones. We were blessed with good weather and took advantage by drinking vino in the sun whenever possible.

Favourite new tapas bar cum market.

To celebrate Andy’s birthday, we went to my fave eatery. We all loved our meals and I managed to avoid having the Ostrich this time! My duck liver terrine was sublime, and I think the hit of the day.

Birthday Lunch - yes, we had the same table.

Our planned stay in Grazalema has been thwarted by the damned weather. It’s snowing up in them hills and we just couldn’t face it. So, instead we are checking out some local towns of Rota, Chipiona and Sanlucar de Barrameda (another sherry town).

Sadly we left our bikes in El P. We had always planned on disposing of them before we started our mad trek home and this worked out well. The maintenance engineer on site helped us out with some stuff on Boris (spare wheel fitting) and he was glad to take them for his kids. I was happy they went to a good home. Lawrence is happy they are no longer hanging off the spare wheel. I’ll miss my bicicleta, but once we really get going, we won’t need them.

 

Pintxo Party Chez Boris

And about 4 hours later

We’ll be back in fabulous Sevilla this weekend to meet mates from Texas. John and Travis are having a ‘father and son trip’ to Europe. Fortunately we never tire of this characterful city. Once we leave there we’ll be making our way to Barcelona to catch our ferry on Feb 19 to Civitavecchia. This will feel like the beginning of the end – or is that the end of the beginning? Anyways, it will be the start of the homeward journey.

To refresh your memory, as I doubt you have the details etched on your brain, the plan is:

Split on March 1^st by ferry, then south to Dubrovnik, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, NE Greece, Northern Turkey, Georgia (by April), across the Caucasus, Chechnya, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan (please try to keep up), back into Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia – to Vladivostok by mid September – or something like that.

Lawrence is working on setting up a GPS tracker thingy so you can see where we are at any given moment. That way you can let us know!

Paul and Carol (new chums) gave us a bottle of emergency gin in exchange for one of our ground mats. I think we’re gonna need it!

 

Men At Work - the United Nations step in to help with spare wheel problem.  Spanish, Dutch, German, Scots, Aussie - (I had to supply in some much needed input)