Thursday 27 February - La Azohía

Where's Bertie? He's still sitting just across the road from the beach at La Azohía.
Weather: Another glorious warm day.

The sun had just popped up over the hills, quickly warming the day from its overnight temperature of 12 degrees, as we stepped out of the door for a run along the coast. My leg was painfree, but I kept the distance short for fear that overdoing it could may cause a relapse tomorrow.

Looking west along the bay in the morning light.

Pre-run selfie. Unusually, we stayed together for the duration today.

A bit of research came next in my day, as I looked at the walking options nearby. One of the nice things about La Azohía is that the hills come right down to the sea (often you have the choice of flat promenades by the coast or hills if you go inland, but not both in one place), and it turns out that there's not a shortage of paths through those hills. I downloaded three routes and proposed that we would do the shortest of them this afternoon. Mick suggested that wouldn't be compatible with having a Menu del Dia for our lunch and I had to agree; walking was thus deferred until tomorrow.

I also gave a bit of thought to where we're going to head from here. I reached no conclusions and it's a subject we returned to late this afternoon. The main problem is a conflict of wants: we'd like to be inland, in the hills, but we'd also like the ease of running routes and warmer, more settled climate of the coast. We went round in circles looking at options and trying to make a decision, but I think we got there in the end. Although we do, of course, have a good track record of making such a decision then to go completely against it!

In between those two planning sessions came another few hours of work for Mick, and a huge lunch:

Four courses this time (five if, per the menu, you count coffee as a course). A ridiculous amount of food, but we battled through it.

We were nearly back at Bertie after lunch when I realised that our bag was still at the restaurant. Without panic (it was highly unlikely in a location such as this that anyone would have walked off with it, and if they had they would have been sorely disappointed by its contents) we doubled back on ourselves to retrieve it and in the process learnt the Spanish word for 'backpack'.

Talking of learning Spanish, our progress with the language has improved since we started using the Duolingo App a couple of weeks ago (previously we were doing - and struggling hard with - an audio course), but we are both still finding it a harder language to learn than German (we've been trying to learn German in the summer and Spanish in the winter, per our tours of the last three years).