We arrived in Los Angeles late yesterday. Just a quick one on the highlights of the rest of our time in France before the next blog on what we’ve been up to since arriving in the US…
We went across to Spain – Sarah’s first time – down the coast to a town called El Port de la Selva. It’s very close to where Hornblower gets captured at one point so I was very excited to go to the area. We visited a great fort – Fort de Bellegarde – which guards the border between France and Spain. The old border posts are interesting – completely disused and covered in graffiti. Well done Schengen!
We went on a few walks around the area, always from Ceret. We climbed the mountain behind Ceret – a small peak of only 675m but at least we can say we conquered a peak of the Pyrenees! From the top you can see the whole of the Roussillon region – French Catalonia. There was a flagpole and a plaque with a Catalan poem at the top. We walked on the road that Laurie Lee used to cross into Spain in 1937 to join the International Brigade, and saw some Griffon vultures, which are huge and ride the thermals looking for carrion (they might have appeared because we sat down for a rest). French footpaths are notoriously badly signposted, and tracks apparently leading to where you want to go can lead to a ‘private’ sign half way along – why not put it at the track entrance? At least our walks were extended a bit!
We also visited another fort, at Salses. On the way back we saw some flamingos on the local ‘etang’, which my dad got particularly excited about, and saw the remnants of a recent forest fire, perhaps from last Summer.
We left Ceret on Thursday afternoon and got a lift to Montpelier with my Dad and Sue. From there they were driving back to the UK with a couple of stops on the way. We flew in the morning from Montpelier to Paris (1.5hrs) and then in the afternoon took the nearly 12-hour flight from Paris to Los Angeles. I’ll describe that in my next post, along with why I don’t recommend anyone ever fly with French Bee, and our first impressions of the USA and of Los Angeles in particular…
JH Woodcarving 