Saturday 7 October 2017

Autumn in the Selva de Oza

 From Jaca you drive to the village of Puente la Reina on the main N-260 national road. they are building a motorway, but as a national road-it links Jaca with Pamplona-it's a disgrace. Puente la Reina, as the name says has a bridge which crosses the river Aragón, after which you turn right and drive next to the river Subordan, a tributary of the Aragón. Past Javierregay, Embún and round the edge of Hecho. Past Siresa with its spectacular Romanesque church-all that's left of the monastery that once housed 150 monks. Here the road gets narrower, you drive through a quite narrow ravine called Hell's Mouth- la Boca del Infierno and into the area of the Selva de Oza. In the past 20 years Oza has come along! It was an area with two derelict campsites and some empty buildings with spectacular scenery and now the campsites have reopened, freshly painted and refurbished; there's a café-restaurant, a restaurant, an adventure playground with wires running from tree to tree as well as spectacular scenery.
We had a lovely walk along the steep gorge side on a warm autumn morning. Here are a few photos:
an amazing collection of mushrooms on a treestump

you can see the wires on the treewalks


more autumn mushrooms on a fallen tree





autumn colours on the Boca del Infierno

On the way back we stopped in Hecho and had a rather expensive but exquisite meal in a restaurant called Cantere. Lovely, very fine food.

Sunday 3 September 2017

Patchwork

Two sides
of the cushion

Again, two 
sides



After I'd made 
the little cushion, I decided it was too small and made it bigger. The one on the right I made last year.


Summer 2017

What with one thing and another I haven't put anything on this blog for some time.One thing was the glut of plums. We onlty have one tree but it wasn't pruned at all and produced an awful lot of fruit. We ate some but most of it went into rather sloppy plum jelly. Last year I bought some packets of pectin in France to add to my jams (they don't sell it here) and I don't think I got the hang of it. The jelly tastes nice but pours rather too well!

A visit to Riglos to see the amazing "Mallos"




From just inside the entrance to Loarre Castle, on the same trip.
Taking photos of flowers in Candanchu
Then at the beginning of July the choir went to Lasarte to do a concert, after which we went to San Sebastián for a few hours

San Juan de la Peña



The Aspe valley looking down into France


In Cantabria, the lovely Santillana del Mar, which was so crowded we couldn't even park the first time we tried!


Don't try and go on Sunday afternoon in August.






This is the official source of the river Ebro


And this is the street where we finally managed to park in the pouring rain in Santander

This is the Botín Centre, built by the Banco Santander people


There are some amazing beaches in Cantabria; unfortunately the weather was against us and the sea was rough-this day at Tagle they put up the red flag which also happened at Suances where the wind whipped the sand in a painful way.



This is an inlet next to Tagle which we saw from above

A ruin which was more picturesque from a distance.



The famous caves of Altamira were fully booked and we'd already seen the museum (the actual caves are visitable by about 10 people a week by a lottery for ticket holders) so we tried some called la Cueva de las Monedas. They were also fully booked, so we saw the village nearby called Puente Viesgo






The last excursion was to Santoña; it was probably the best weather that week