Foreign Perspectives

We should be sitting in the sun today but instead we’re freezing with a biting wind blowing quite a gale as I look outside from our conservatory towards the hillside.

Aren’t conservatories wonderful things? This isn’t even a sponsored post and I’m praising them anyway!

Seriously though, it really shouldn’t be as cold today as it actually is. We should still be able to use solar power to heat the water but it’s simply not a runner at the moment.

Although people can often assume that global warming would mean exactly that, in fact it wouldn’t as global warming would change the climate in ways that aren’t necessarily fully understood. Yes, some parts would be warmer and perhaps the earth as a whole would be, but in that transition to a warmer earth some areas would have severe changes to their weather patterns.

Despite spending almost two days solid looking for a place for us to go for Christmas, we’re still looking.

Having said that, we’ve narrowed the search down considerably. For one thing, thanks to a spate of rather chilly weather here, we’re thinking that perhaps trawling round the German Christmas markets in the biting cold wasn’t such a good idea after all and perhaps somewhere rather warmer would be the way to go.

So, where? In principle, the Canary islands are the place to go for certain warm weather but they’re way too expensive at this time of year so we’re looking at Ibiza and Majorca at the moment with a side-bet on Alicante and Valencia.

At the moment, the problem is that it’s not nearly so easy to find apartments as it is to find hotels online. One major pain is that most apartment/villa bookings are “on request” which means that we’re sitting waiting for replies re availability and prices from several places.

Now that we’ve started looking at the detailed costings, we’re thinking of the tradeoff of the £30 each flight vs just driving there.

Going in the car is a whole lot simpler of course in that there’s none of the hassle of weighing luggage and juggling stuff from one case to another that you get into with airline trips. A minor downside is that it’s about six hours drive from here to Alicante but then it’s nearly three hours to Barcelona airport so it’s not a whole lot further.

Much simpler to organise too in that all we need is the accommodation and no worries about flights nor airport parking.

Despite spending the whole morning searching for somewhere to go over our Christmas break, we’ve still not settled on anywhere to the extent of booking it.

At the moment, we’re looking towards places further south than in the original plans in that we can get away for longer for around the same amount of money as we could when we were considering the likes of Germany or Switzerland.

So, in the frame at the moment is Ibiza which comes in at the lowest price for the flights and the apartments but means that we need to book into a hotel in Barcelona before and after the holiday that costs almost as much as the apartment we’d be staying in for the week in Ibiza. Also, Ibiza doesn’t have a great image and the apartment in question isn’t in a great town on the island.

Next up is Mallorca for which the flights are more expensive and so are the apartments BUT we don’t need the night before and after the holiday in Barcelona so the overall cost is much the same as Ibiza. There seems to be a whole lot more to do in Mallorca too which is a big plus point.

Late news: Wendy fancies Basel in Switzerland so she’s looking up hotels for there too.

I find that that’s a very difficult question to answer these days.

Originally, it was very much an expat blog, covering the process of settling into a life in France and therefore it slotted fairly neatly into the “travel” category. By listing it as a travel blog, I picked up a whole lot of other stuff travel related and at times over the last year it has most definitely been a travel blog.

However, a glance at the category cloud shows that this is changing. The rise of the America category is a little misleading as that really reflects the increased number of paid posts that I do these days but the rise of Banking & Finance is perhaps more meaningful as it represents the combined effect of me writing more paid posts in this category but also of me writing a lot more normal ones in it as well.

What’ll it look like in six months? I’m sure that America will be much larger for one thing and France will have shrunk as we’re effectively in the process of withdrawing from France (which’ll be quite a long process I suspect). Although you can’t see it yet, the UK categories are also starting to slowly rise so expect to see them starting to displace a few of the France categories over the coming year.