I visited Tenerife in 1989 and stayed in the tourist resort of Los Christianos near Playa de Los Americas in a hotel complex called the Parque Santiago. One day I took a coach tour to the Teide National Park. It wasn’t a long trip in terms of kilometres but the bus left early because it happens to be an awfully long way to climb to the top.
Posted in Beaches, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Natural Environment, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Canary Islands, Culture, Life, Los Christianos, Mount Teide, Tenerife, Volcano
In my previous post I dealt with the frustration associated with buying a train ticket in Portugal at a self service ticket machine. Today I move on to the mystery of supermarket checkouts in Portugal.
In the country there were familiar supermarkets for us from the UK, ALDI and LIDL and then a couple that were not – Pingo Doce and Continente. Continente is the largest supermarket chain in Portugal and Pingo Doce is the third. In Setubal we came across a convenient Pingo Doce located close by to the apartment so we went there to shop for our evening meal.
I liked all of these supermarkets in Portugal, they all had a much wider product range than in the UK, more bread, more fruit, more vegetables but especially more fish and whilst Kim shopped for essentials I browsed for fantasy. The shopping experience is mostly similar to being in the UK and providing you remain focused you can have filled a basket, sidestepped the tempting but unwanted special offers, have negotiated all of the aisles and be finished in just a few minutes.
But then you get to the check-outs.
Chaos. Absolute chaos. In the UK you can expect to be through the checkout in under five minutes even if the two people in front both have a full trolley load to clear. Checkout staff in the UK are the fastest on the planet, no mercy if you don’t keep up. If it was an Olympic event they would win gold, silver and bronze. Not so in Portugal. They would come last. Fifteen minutes in the store – thirty minutes (on a good day) waiting to pay.
And it was the same everywhere that we stayed and shopped in Portugal, Obidos, Cascais, Ericeira, Lisbon and now Setúbal.
A main reason for this is that most customers want to pay in cash but the cashiers have no coins in the tills so when someone offers a note they ask if they might possibly have the right change which involves fumbling in pockets and purses looking for loose, long forgotten coins. “Oh, here is an Escudo, do you still take Escudo?” Worst of all some customers just throw their coins down and let the cashier do the sorting and when it is all done take an age to put it away again.
This slows the whole process down to somewhere significantly below glacial speed and several conga lines of frustrated customers begin to form and begin to block up the aisles. Although several frustrated people take the risk there is no point whatsoever changing lanes because they are all the same. They are all advancing at the pace of a silted up river bed. This is life in the sloth lane.
Quite by chance there was some welcome entertainment as a group of university students entertained with music and singing which made the process a bit more tolerable but only just.
I have an important travel tip here…
DO NOT under any circumstances let the cashier see that you have a purse full of coins because they will beg to relieve you of it. I swear that they are on a shift bonus to get hold of coins. I like to carry a little pouch with loose change, say about twenty euro or so but have learnt from experience never to show it. One of my travel objectives is always to come home with my pouch full of coins ready for next time.
Behaviour at supermarket checkouts is something that intrigues me. I wrote about it once in a post a long time ago (2010) and I do understand that it might be considered a bit sexist now but here it is now (with apologies where considered necessary)…
So, we negotiated the checkout queue, went home with our purchases and had a simple meal of cooked piri-piri chicken, new potatoes and fresh salad and after as the sun began to slide into the River Sado took a walk to the shoreline and just sat and watched.
Tomorrow we thought that we might try and find a beach. We considered taking the apple green ferry to the Troia peninsular but decided instead to go for a hike.
Posted in Age of Innocence, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Estubal, Lisbon, Pingo Doce Supermarket, UNESCO, World Heritage
We are all getting older. This year my sister turned sixty-five and my younger brother hit the big sixty. We all agreed to get together for a weekend at my sister’s place in Gloucestershire. I had nothing to celebrate, I am sixty-eight so nothing special about that.
Lindsay lives in Lydbrook, close to one of my favourite towns in England, Ross-on-Wye, and has a lovely house and garden which stretches into the boundary of the forest,
.
I tend to think that she lives a long way from me but to put things into some kind of perspective, four hundred miles is not so far if you live in Australia, just short of driving from Melbourne to Adelaide or in the USA, Phoenix in Arizona to Los Angeles in California. I live in the UK and like most other people that live here I just think that four hundred miles is a long way!
Lydbrook is in the Forest of Dean. The UK is the second-least wooded country in Europe and only Ireland has less trees. There are not any forests where we live in Lincolnshire, it is the most treeless county in England where the land is mostly given over to arable farming which produces almost all of the vegetables for the entire country. According to a recent survey Surrey is surprisingly the most wooded County in England. The nearest to us, I guess, is Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire but there really isn’t much of that left either, Robin Hood wouldn’t be able to hide in it for long these days that’s for sure!
The forest is an area of about forty-five square miles of mixed woodland, one of the few surviving ancient woodlands in England. A large area that was once reserved for royal hunting after 1066 and until quite recently remained the second largest crown forest in England.
Forest Law finally came to an end during the second half of the seventeenth century but by then newly secured enclosures had taken a large bite out of the forests which were also sources of fuel for a rapidly growing population.
The forest was used exclusively as a royal hunting ground by the Tudor kings and subsequently a source of food for the royal court. Later its rich deposits of ore led to its becoming a major source of iron. Forest of Dean timber was particularly fine and was regarded as the best source for building ships.
The navy had, for many years, depended on English forests for their ships. According to legend, the Spanish asked one of their ambassadors during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to sneak up and set fire to the Forest of Dean, hoping it would give their Armada an advantage.
As England’s navy grew larger and Brittania ruled the waves the need for timber began to seriously pick away at the woodland and from an estimated land coverage of 15% in 1086 as recorded in the Doomsday Book, England’s forests and woods had reduced to just 5% by 1905.
Where did all of these trees go? Well, for example It is estimated it took six thousand trees to build Nelson’s battleship HMS Victory, five thousand of which were oak. There were twenty-seven ships of the line at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 so that was an astounding one hundred and sixty thousand trees. The French and Spanish fleet had thirty-three ships and they were generally bigger than those in the English fleet.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Forest was a complex industrial region with deep coal mines, iron mines, iron and tinplate works, foundries, quarries and stone-dressing works, wood distillation works producing chemicals and with a sinuous network of railways but these are all gone now.
The Forest of Dean is not a big forest, the three largest in England are Kielder in Northumberland, The New Forest in Hampshire and Thetford Forest in Norfolk. Kielder and Thetford are both recent forests both planted in the 1920s as part of a UK project of reforestation following the First-World-War but the Forest of Dean like the New Forest and Sherwood is an ancient forest of medieval England.
We managed a couple of rural walks in the Autumn sunshine, I liked it, a place of retreat and gentle reflection amongst statuesque trees, leaves falling like confetti, pregnant leaf buds and gently shifting branches with brief glimpses of the clear blue sky above, a place deliciously cool and damp with the diffused sun casting mysterious shadows over tiny clearings.
Living in Lincolnshire I don’t get to stroll through forests very often, I mostly walk through wide open fields. Quite a contrast.
We also got to go on a train ride. It was supposed to be a steam train ride but the engine broke down just the day before so we got a diesel train instead.
There was more experience that I was hoping for before we left the Forest of Dean and that was to see a wild boar. These days there are wild boar in several places in England but the Forest of Dean is the easiest and best place to spot them. They had been extinct in England for four hundred years or so but sometime in the 1990s someone released the boar into the forest and they have flourished in conditions that suit them perfectly (rich, deciduous woodland, agricultural land nearby and the occasional household rubbish bin to raid) and it is estimated that there may now well be almost two-thousand roaming the forest in various sounders, the term for a herd of wild swine.
There is evidence of them everywhere in the forest. Every few yards, the earth has been gouged up and pushed aside, the undergrowth freshly disturbed. At the base of the beech trees are long, raking scratches where the pigs has ripped over the topsoil looking for something beneath and around the base of the larger trees were deep, pale craters, as if the forest had recently been hit by a massive hail storm.
Lindsay is always telling stories of encounters with the animals and we had seen plenty of evidence that they were nearby and all around but so far we had not seen one but then in the evening driving to a pub in a nearby village we spotted a sow with some youngsters quite close to the road and I was happy about that.
The next morning we debated what to do. The majority decision was to visit a nearby attraction called ‘The Forbidden Corner’ but due to bureaucratic planning restrictions tickets could only be bought on-line and without communications at the cottage this had been quite impossible.
We drove there anyway and at the entrance they confirmed that entrance was only by advance booking so we took a bagged a spot later in the week and drove off to look for something else to do.
The children thought they might like to visit the chocolate factory in nearby Leyburn and even though all of the signs seemed to suggest that it was open it was in fact closed so we had an empty car park to ourselves to debate what to do.
We decided to go to the town of Richmond.
Posted in Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Natural Environment, United Kingdom, World Heritage
Tagged Culture, Life, Medieval castles, Medieval reenactment, Richmond, Yorkshire
As a couple of highly amateurish and very part time cyclists, who wouldn’t know Lance Armstrong if he hurtled straight into us we were going to go for a bike ride.
We chose Île de Ré because we don’t do hills, we are used to the subtle undulations of the Lincolnshire landscape. So for us the prospect of Île de Ré, with its network of dedicated cycle paths and flat topography seemed practically perfect,
Posted in Beaches, Childhood, Europe, France, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Bicycle Hire, France, Ile de Ré, La Flotte, La Rochelle, Le Bois Plage-en Ré, Saint Martin-de-Ré
Gran Canaria was formed by a volcano that grew out of the sea and continued to spew enough lava onto the surface to break through the ocean and form an island. It is circular in shape with a mountain peak in the middle which separates the island into two distinct sectors, north and south. Viewed from above it looks rather like a beached jellyfish.
Posted in Beaches, Cathedrals, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Postcards, Spain, Travel
Tagged Canary Islands, Culture, Gran Canaria, Lanzarote, Life, Palmitos Park, Sioux City Gran Canaria, Sioux City Iowa
On day three of our mini-holiday in East Yorkshire, the heatwave predictably broke, clouds returned, the temperature plummeted and the panic was all over. This is England not the Costa Blanca.
So we made the short car journey to nearby Bridlington. Bridlington remains a busy seaside resort because it still has a railway service and after the city of Hull is the second largest settlement in East Yorkshire.
We decided against the harbour and the beach because we had been there previously and quite frankly it is a bit too much English seasidy for us and the seagulls are a nuisance and went instead to the old town. Free Parking! Where can you find Free Parking these days? Answer – Bridlington Old Town.
The historical centre of Bridlington is absolutely wonderful.
A cobbled street of rapid decay locked into a bygone age, the original Georgian shop windows are grubby, the displays are many decades out of date, the window frames are flaking and pock-marked, no wonder then that they choose this location for filming the remake of the comedy series ‘Dad’s Army’ in 2014. Being a huge ‘Dad’s Army’ fan I was really happy about wandering along this special street and made a note to watch the film when I was back at home. And I did!
We parked the car close to the Bayle Museum, the original fortified gatehouse to Bridlington Priory. It had free admission so I wasn’t expecting a great deal but as it turned out it was well worth almost an hour of time spent exploring the seven rooms and the history of Bridlington. So good in fact that I didn’t have to think twice about paying a voluntary contribution on the way out. That is unusual for me.
Next we visited the nearby Priory. In the days of its medieval glory Bridlington Priory was one of the great monastic houses of England. Its wealth and possessions made it a key monastery in the North, one of the largest and richest of the Augustinian order. The Priory is just a church now and a fraction of its previous size courtesy of the insistence of Henry VIII that it should be demolished in 1537 to remove the potential Catholic pilgrimage site of Saint John of Bridlington. Henry didn’t like Catholic Saints and Pilgrimages as this challenged his new self-appointed role as Head of the Church of England.
Saint John of Bridlington, it turns out is one of the most famous of English Saints and I am ashamed to admit that I had never heard of him before now.
A little about John courtesy of Wiki…
Born in 1320 in the village of Thwing on the Yorkshire Wolds, about nine miles west of Bridlington, educated at a school in the village from the age of five, completing his studies at Oxford University and then entered the Augustinian Canons Regular community of Bridlington Priory. He carried out his duties with humility and diligence, and was in turn novice master, almsgiver, preacher and sub-prior. He became Canon of the Priory in 1346 and was eventually elected Prior in 1356. He served as Prior for 17 years before his death on 10 October 1379.
During his lifetime he enjoyed a reputation for great holiness and for miraculous powers. It is claimed that on one occasion he changed water into wine. He brought people back from the dead and restored a blind man’s sight. On another, five seamen from Hartlepool in danger of shipwreck called upon God in the name of John, whereupon the prior himself walked on water and appeared to them and brought them safely to shore.
It seems that anything Jesus could do, John of Bridlington could match.
So good was John at performing miracles that according to legend he continued to perform them even after he had died of the plague and he continued to bring people back from the dead for some time. That’s a very good trick if you can do it. These days I imagine John would be admitted to the Magic Circle.
John of Bridlington was canonised and declared a Saint by Pope Boniface in 1401, he was the last English Saint before the Reformation and the dissolution of the Monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.
A Saint has to be a patron Saint of something and although John is associated with fishing the patron saint of fishermen had already been bagged by Saint Andrew (I will make you Fishers of Men and all that stuff) so Saint John needed something else. The Spanish Saint Raymond Nonnat is the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth but Saint John is very specifically the patron saint of difficult childbirth. I kid you not. You could not make it up.
The best bit about the church was a side chapel reserved for prayer where people are invited to leave a note requesting a prayer (or a miracle). This one was my favourite…
Other Unlikely Saint Stories…
Saint James and Santiago de Compostella
Saint Janurius and the Miracle of the Blood
The Feast of Saint Paul’s Shipwreck
I like going on holiday in England but as I get older and fuel gets more expensive I find driving tedious and frustrating. East Yorkshire has everything I need, the roads aren’t busy and it is only fifty miles away.
I have written about it before so just pictures this time.
Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Beaches, Childhood, Europe, Food, History, Literature, Natural Environment, Postcards, Travel, United Kingdom, World Heritage
Tagged Beverley, Bridlington, East Riding, Holderness, Hull, Skipsea Sands, Skipsea Yorkshire, Yorkshire
On arrival I was immediately impressed. I live near the resort town of Cleethorpes but although it is a popular holiday resort it has to be said that it is just a muddy estuary where the sea is barely visible for long periods of the day but this was real North Sea coast with a raging sea, barnacled groynes, pounding surf, churning water and a pebble beach clattering away as it was constantly rearranged by the tidal surge.
Have Bag, Will Travel 