Snow
Podcast: Basque Country & Ordesa National Park, Spain
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I made this podcast around Easter on a 1500KM road trip from Barcelona to the Basque Country (País Vasco), then on to the beautiful Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park in the Spanish Pyrenees. The trip takes in various locations including San Sebastian, Bilbao, Mundaka, Biarritz (in France), Torla, the Cola de Caballo trek and Cañón de Añisclo.
Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park (in Spanish Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido) has been included since 1997 by UNESCO in the Biosphere Reserve of Ordesa-Viñamala. It is also part of the cross-border Pyrénées – Mont Perdu World Heritage Site.
16 photos
Location Map
Links
Photos of the Basque Country, Spain.
Video showing MONSTER surf in Mundaka, Spain
Wikipedia article on Ordesa y Monte Perdido National Park.
The Basque Country
Cañón de Añisclo (in Spanish)
San Sebastian
Bilbao
Eduardo Chillida
Photos of the Basque Country, Spain
25 photos
It’s snowing in Copenhagen and it’s April!!!!
Dear diary…While writing this to you, I hope I am still asleep and just having a nightmare. I look outside and it is freezing cold and snowing. This could not possibly be happening in April could it????
Unfortunately I am pretty sure that I am awake and not just having a nightmare. It is actually snowing outside. The picture was taken from my window (a few minutes ago)…huge snowflakes coming down.
Now I don’t know what happened with the global warming. From where I stand it feels like global freezing. I really need some sun and heat 🙂
It’s bloody cold in England, LOOK!
Every time I return to England, it seems almost immediately there is a weather-related superlative issued for the month I choose to return. We all know the Brits are obsessed with weather, but in June 2007 it was the wettest/worst June since records began (hundreds of years ago), this winter, it has already been the coldest Winter for 30 or 40 years. And counting.
With temperatures as low as -22 Celsius, and a decent covering of snow: 10,000 schools are shut, the economy is losing 600 million pounds a day, old people are burning cheap second hand books to warm their houses (it’s cheaper than coal!) and the RSPB is regularly publishing warnings about imminent irrecoverable bird deaths.
So what did I do (apart from feeding the birds)? I tried to get back to Spain, on Easyjet, from Gatwick. Not a very sound plan. I ended up wasting the day in queues of people whilst waiting for the inevitable “Flight cancelled” confirmation. In the end it came, and I headed back to Oxford, only to try again another day…
You’ll perhaps be pleased to know (I was) that I made it back to Spain having rescheduled my flight for 3 days later. I got to Barcelona, wasn’t as pleasantly surprised as I’d hoped by the ‘warm climes’ here, and have promptly set about sorting out my crap Sony Vaio (sounds like it has chronic wind) so that I can get on with my IVOZI audio work soon.
On that note, I finally got my hands on the Zoom H2 Recorder and will be starting recording again in a couple of days.
I’ll leave you with a photo of my mother’s back garden in Eynsham, England where I stayed during my weather related incarceration. I tried to feed the birds, but my nuts promptly froze.
A White Christmas in Yorkshire, England
It’s my first Christmas back in England for 7 years and I have been lucky enough to be treated to the first White Christmas I remember. Perhaps it’s the fact that I have ventured North of the Watford Gap for nearly the first time in my life – heading up to Bedale in North Yorkshire for a family reunion.
Here’s a photo from today – Boxing Day – where we went for an afternoon walk (and sledge) in the grounds of the 12th Century Jervaulx Abbey.
