Travelling

The pink super moon woke me up last night, very large and low above the Down on its journey, partly hiding behind our fir tree. Miss travelling – been over a year since visited Europe. Thought Brexit was bad until the virus arrived.

With the family grew up with mostly drove to the South of Europe by car for three weeks sun and sea. These holidays began with painful typhoid jabs some weeks before. We left the house in the middle of the night, sleeping on the ferry to begin the drive next morning. Mostly we drove to the south of Spain through the Pyrenees but also through Switzerland to Italy and last family holiday when should have been picking subjects for A-levels down to Greece. Shorter trips to Berlin to visit family Only reallised some time later origins much further away.

Visiting markets and eating lots of french bread and cheese, although once ate bacon rashers made from horse meat in a French hotel – very tasty – but felt terrible afterwards. Often slept overnight in French town squares for safety where the lorry drivers pulled up to snooze and remember falling asleep to sound of pop pop bikes driving away in the distance.

Didn’t appreciate the skill of my father driving the hairpin bends through the Pyrenees or the beauty – just the never ending mountains and no sea.

Until he had a bad knee and was older would never let anyone drive them and used to ominously tell me if i drove him somewhere, what his Dad had told him, both in the army – “remember a car is a lethal weapon”

On the way through Spain, stopped for fruit sold besides the road – especially peaches.

One of our holidays further away – we were driving back home close to Albanian border and because we couldn’t find a hotel or didn’t have enough money – we stopped to sleep in the car. Two inside and two outside besides the car – it was warm enough with sleeping bags. Remember being woken up in middle of the night because police with guns had told us to move on because there were bandits in the area.

Remember the journey to where we were going more than the destination except a beach in Spain where someone had been bitten by a scorpian.