Béjar

This is a town of two halves. The old town has everything you would want, a medieval wall you can walk around, old building museums, small winding streets lined with shops, set in the beautiful surrounds of snow covered mountains where depending on the season you can walk, cycle or ski. An old train track provides access to the countryside as a cycle path/ walking path. But despite all this the old town is on life support, the shops are empty, grey and dusty, no one is perambulating the streets. We were the only people looking at the leather Torah in the museums. The only open bar had one man smoking his fag outside it. The dearest flat in the estate agents was €70,000 for 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, the cheapest €10,000. The other half of the town is a typical Spanish suburb but at least it had human life. The countryside is stunning and we made use of the cycle track to visit a nearby reservoir, only adding blackcaps to my positive ID list of birds but hearing so many. And on the second day a lovely stroll on the in the hills.

Bertie is starting to be a bit of a concern. The fridge is not working on gas which we discovered on Saturday evening just after buying a week’s worth of food. The fridges thermostat relay is noisy when on electrics. Half the lights are not working ( I think our mice friends caused this along with the holes in the chairs). The satellite TV hasn’t worked for at least a year but we don’t use that. Now the engine decided to display a water in fuel warning and go into limp home mode. Luckily this cleared itself after we pulled off the motorway and restarted the engine but will it stay that way? It’s 13 years old, and we have given it a hard 4 years, I can see an expensive decision looming.