6 Jan 2010 - Parcent to Jalon

This was Rothbury, where we spent Christmas and New Year with Stuart and his family. The photo was taken on1 January, the day before we returned to Spain. We had very similar weather for two weeks and as a result had not been able to do much walking during our holiday.
This was the Jalon valley on 6 January. Due to a cancelled flight from Newcastle to Alicante it took us 30 hours to get to Parcent. As a result we missed our Monday Club walk. We returned to a broken washing machine, and waited two days for the repair man to arrive. This morning is the national holiday for Three Kings, so there was no point in wasting another day. Instead we decided to walk into Jalon for a bit of exercise.


During our holiday in Rothbury the weather had been between 1c and minus 4c. Very cold, lots of snow and ice. As a result we spent a lot of time keeping warm in the house, or being cold walking to the local shops. When we checked the weather for Parcent we could see it was 20c, and we often thought of our favourite café in Jalon. So we were very pleased to sit in the warm sun with our café con letche and a toastada.

It was ideal walking weather. Warm sun and blue skies. Very similar to spring in UK. We saw very few people during our walk, apart from some cyclists. We had thought that it would be very busy, as it is a national holiday. But perhaps everyone was visiting family. Whatever they were doing, it was nice to have the beautiful valley to ourselves.

Stuart gave us a new camera for Christmas, and this was a good opportunity to try it out. Its much more complicated than my previous one, which is about 8 years old. There are more options to select various settings, which is also an opportunity to select the wrong one. So we experimented with the various settings by taking different types of photographs.

It is often hazy in the valley, but today was particularly clear and sharp. And the orange trees were particularly colourful.

This is our favourite part of the walk, with Parcent ahead left and our house ahead right, both dominated by the Cavell Verde hill behind.

We were surprised to find that many of the trees had new blossoms so early in the year. It has been a very mild winter here in Parcent, which is no doubt the reason. It also gave us an opportunity to try another setting on the camera. My old one could not have captured this type of subject.
The orange’s looked very inviting, and Jan could not resist one. In fact they were quite bitter and not nearly as tasty as they looked. On the other hand, its easy to forget how pleasant it is to have a local walk where you have the option to pick an orange from a tree.