Back in Vigo.

So here we are finally, back in Galicia. We left Saddleworth in the pouring rain, with a much appreciated lift to the airport in our daughter's car. She had to drop the baby off while we finished gathering our stuff together and go and park round the corner because double yellow lines have been helpfully painted outside our house.

A new estate has been built more or less behind our houses and the residents claim they cannot see proper.y to get out of the estate onto the main road. Funnily enough, then there was a factory there lorries managed to come and go without problems!

We knew the yellow lines were coming and all of us wrote letters of protest, all to no avail.

On the day after the yellow lines appeared, for the first time in the thirty years we have lived in that house, there was a bobby on the beat patrolling the area. Is this a coincidence?

Anyway, we set off in the rain but by the time we reached Liverpool it had eased off some. By the time we were boarding, the sun was trying to come out. It wasn't exactly sunny when we reached Oporto but it was a lot drier than Greater Manchester has been for the last few days. In fairness to the North West of England, our daughter told us that the day had improved considerably.

We had a longish wait for the AUTNA bus to Vigo, during which time I examined a rathervdisturbing display of "cartoons" in the airport. All of them looked at glance qitebinnocent but had a disturbing element. There was a skateboard park built on top of abandoned crashed cars. A sort of Picasso "Guernica" spin off showed a couple escaping from the rubble, but they were followed by a suicide bomber. All very strange stuff.

however, the bus arrived without too  uch delay and all was good, despite the rather smelly couple who got in at Cerveira and sat in front of us. Such things cannot be legislated for.

We reached the flat just in time for a quick dash into the Mercadona supermarket before it closed. Everything in order at the flat, we headed out for As Cobas, one of our favourite wifi bars to catch up with stuff. Little seems to have changed around here. There are still a lot of empty 'bajos', the ground floor premises intended to be shops and cafes and so on. One of the local hairdressers has changed its name. But our favourite bars appear to have survived in our absence, which is reassuring.

The bar we are in at the moment had changed its wifi password - how inconsiderate! But as the password includes the year and the year has moved on, we can probably forgive them!