The seemingly innocuous little bug that I picked up six days ago is still adversely affecting Team Basil. When we woke up Sarah was still a little under the weather and so Basil’s day trip was cancelled. It looked like we were destined for the laziest day of the whole trip.
However, once she had got up and had breakfast she felt much better and we decided to go for a walk in the forest. Rather foolishly I decided not to take my camera with me because I assumed that all the forest would be like the part I had already seen, but I was wrong.
Today we went for a walk up what the man in reception refers to as “the mountain”. It is in fact no such thing, just a relatively high piece of limestone outcrop. When we reached the higher ground the vegetation, including the trees, thinned out considerably. There was also much more of a mixture trees. Mostly evergreen, but some very varied species. The ground was covered with wild rosemary, thyme and a small leaved but pungent basil. We have sometimes bought packets of dried “Herbes de Provence” and now we know why it is so named.
Rather puzzlingly Sarah came across a dwarf tree or bush which was full of acorns. They were identical to the acorns on a British oak tree, but the leaf and tree stucture was completely different. We haven’t had chance to look up what it was.
Back at camp I started planning for life in the UK. Anyone who read the blog before we left home may recall that neither Sky TV or BT Broadband would allow us to suspend our accounts while we were away and as a result we had to cancel both. This means we need to set up new providers when we return. I commented in the blog that Sky and BT were being very short sighted, because when we return we may find better products on the market. Today’s scouring of the internet has confirmed we will change both. I think we will go down the freesat route for TV, which coupled with the Apple TV we already have and a Netflix account should provide what we need for about one tenth of what we were paying Sky. For Broadband Vodafone have launched a fibre to the cabinet service while we have been away, where you don’t pay for line rental. This will cut our BT bill by more than half!
We bought a fly swatter somewhere in central Europe in anticipation of mosquitoes and midges in Finland, which it turned out we barely needed. On this site we have a few house flies which are a bit of a nuisance when we are trying to enjoy the sun. It has therefore become a bit of a ritual for me to periodically reduce the fly population while we are sitting outside. I have discovered that some flies are much better at evading my swipes than others. Obviously the flies that evade my attentions can go away and breed while the less fortunate ones go to the big sugar bowl in the sky. It has occurred to me, that by evolution, we will eventually end up with an unswattable fly!
After lunch Sarah, now feeling much better, despite our longish walk this morning decided to go on another walk. You may recall that she got a bit lost while out on her own in the forest in Finland. This has not, however, put her off wandering off into any landscape we come across, in search of the, not very, elusive 10,000 steps. This afternoon her random walk took her to Alphonse Daudet’s windmill, which we had agreed we would visit together. Fortunately I think there are some windmill’s she had not yet visited, so we can still include “the” windmill in a future walk.
Today I am not going to make any predictions about what we are doing tomorrow, since we always seem to change our mind at the moment!