Last night’s meal in the Lido Salpi restaurant was very pleasant. I think it is unusual to find a campsite restaurant open at this time of year and so it was very welcome. The food was good but nothing special, but we got a lovely desert on the house and cost was extremely cheap.

Today was a day of total relaxation. Sarah’s begun to wind down a bit from work and can finally begin to enjoy a day of leisure. I got that habit some time ago!

The dogs won’t allow us to laze about too much though. Sarah was up at 6.30 as Mabel’s tail banging every surface of the motorhome, told us that she, at least, had had enough sleep.

When Sarah got down to the beach she found she was not the first there. As the sun rose there were already two men wading in the sea with strange nets. Sarah had not seen this method of fishing before and it was not clear what they were trying to catch. There are a huge number of shells on the beach and it may be that there are beds of shell fish, possibly the famous vongole, just under the surface.

After breakfast we got out the comfy chairs and sat in the sun. At the moment the temperature varies between 14ºC and 17ºC the big variable being the wind. Today there was little wind and sitting under the clear blue sky was lovely.

Total Relaxation

I planned potential places to visit and stay overnight for the next few days while Sarah took the opportunity of cheap washing machines (€2 a wash) to get a few more things clean.

At Christmas I was bought a new 150-600mm lens for my camera. Basically a huge telephoto. It is what I call my birding lens, because I thought I would capture photos of different bird species as we travelled. As I sat outside, the eucalyptus tree in front of me was full of small birds. I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to christen the lens. So I went inside Basil, carefully got the lens out and attached it to my camera. I came outside, sat back in my chair, and guess what – no birds! I decided to hunt them out, so went for a walk round the campsite, birding lens in hand. They had all disappeared. This is not a good omen for my ornithology. If every time a bird sees the birding lens it’s going to disappear, photos are going to be thin on the ground.

In the late afternoon we went on our longest beach walk to date. By the end the dogs were walking rather than running. We may not be near a beach for the next couple of days, so they needed to make the most of it.

Melek at full gallop