There’s always a good spot for a picnic! Not least Rueta, the beach at the end of the road…
One of the things that I think we both enjoy about living here is that any trip, however mundane (ie to the hardware shop to buy string), turns into an opportunity for a picnic. At the big supermarket in Burela, just one turn down the road and there’s a nice picnic spot where we can watch the fishing boats go in and out.
And one which we only really found a couple of months ago is in San Cibrao on the other side of the river. Here we can sit and look at the mermaid! This is a nice spot as it’s quite sheltered. Another nice spot is by the lighthouse in the back of the photo – but it doesn¡t take too strong a wind to make keeping food on the plate challenging!
Another one is the other side of Cervo where there’s a set of factory ruins which have been made into a sort of picnic spot. This one is nice but we have to watch out for eucalyptus seeds falling (heavily)on our heads!
Yesterday we went to another of our favourites which is the next beach along from San Cibrao.
Unfortunately we arrived at a very high high tide and the beach had disappeared – so we went to the small fishing port next door.
This is the fishing port which used to be an old whale processing factory.
Chayote
We had a storm with strong winds last weekend and a lot of these green things got blown off of a vine at the end of the road. So I picked up a couple of to see what they were.
It turns out they are called Chayote. They are a member of the cucumber/melon etc family, but have one largish seed. it’s texture was melon-like but with a neutral taste. I think you could make it sweet or savoury (a bit like the cucumbers we grew this year, they were very much on the sweet side).
This plant fruits during the autumn / winter. I picked what I assume will be our last courgette yesterday, so this might be a good thing to grow to produce something in the winter.
I also picked something up which had blown off some trees which are tree tomatoes. They were green and looked a bit sad, so we didn’t try eating them, but I’ve put them to one side to see if they will seed. I picked up a couple of damaged chayote fruit to see if I can grow plants from. The plants do belong to someone, so I didn’t like to pick up all the best fruit!
Horace’s absess has cleared now, so we need to get him booked in to get his teeth looked at. Dumpling is having her medication still by inhaler which I think is going well and Charlie hasn’t had another seizure, so we’re yet to start her on the anti-seizure medication. Other than that – little Percy has been a bit spooked this week. Something has scared him and he’s lost his bounce and is very on edge. Hopefully that will pass soon. Unforunately, he makes a sort of squeal when he’s scared, which – of course – Ludvig now mimics – so we are spending a lot of time seeing what is upsetting Percy only to find him asleep somewhere and Ludvig with a mischievous grin on his face.
Talking of Ludvig, he is making us smile at the moment with his freeforming of his phrases. He mixes up his sentences to create some great new ones. A recent one is ‘oh oh oh oh staying alive, staying alive, once I caught a fish’ which is him mixing ‘staying alive’ by the beegees (ooh oooh ooh staying alive, staying a live) with 1,2,3,4,5, once I caught a fish alive.) He’s clever and recognizes common words and builds new sentences from there. So we also get ‘To be or not to three four five’.
If I had known how clever he was going to be I would have planned what I was teaching him so it was a little more logical!!