My garden's full of blue flowers!

Little rockery with muscaria, scilla and a pink

Flowers in my garden: rosemary, muscaria and scilla.

Forget-me-not

Violets

It's spring, but the only daffodils I've seen are in my garden. However, I've got wild violets (purple ones), and until they cut the grass there were white ones all over a park near us!

They were so tiny it was hard to take a photo of them.

Spring

I looked out of my bedroom window this morning and saw a robin. Then I saw another one! We haven't seen any for ages!
The fruit trees are all in flower. My daffodils are beginning to open.

Rome

We had a great trip to Rome last week. The weather was cold and windy, the hotel was basic, but....

there are some really spectacular buildings and ruins, like the Coliseum,

Trajan's column,

Piazza Navona,

I liked the market in Campo di Fiori, with stalls selling vegetables I'd never seen before. 

My first Roman capuccino.

River Ebro

I flew from Zaragoza to Stansted last week. This was the view from the plane just after takeoff.

You can see the Pyrenees

The river snaking across the photo is the Ebro.

Later we crossed the corner between Spain and France and flew alongside the beach of les Landes, just one long, straight beach all the way to the estuary of la Garonne. After that, clouds all the way. 

El Salto de Roldán

Yesterday we drove to Huesca, to visit some friends. It was a beautiful sunny morning; until we approached Huesca, where it was like driving into a grey blanket. Nasty thick, wet fog. Typical of Huesca and Zaragoza. People often say to me: "Like in London, isn't it?" and I have to reply that I've never seen fog in England like we get here, London fog being a thing of the past.

Anyway, it cleared up during the day. In the afternoon we went with our friends to the "Salto de Roldán", a rock formation a short drive from the city. (short but very winding and narrow).I's the Sierra de Guara in the pre-Pyrenees, vertical columns of red-gold rock towering above the planes of the Hoya de Huesca. As in Cataluña a few weeks back, we could look out over the fog in the valley. On some distant ridges you could see windmills standing just clear of the fog. Geat crowds of raucus black birds which I think were jackdaws on the cliffs above us.
Spectacular.

No smoking!

As of 2nd January, smoking has been banned in Spain in all public places....bars, restaurants, hospital doorways, children's playgrounds etc. Poor smokers! Poor bar owners! Good for non-smokers, at last!
It's lovely going into bars and nobody's smoking; being able to eat a meal in a restaurant without smoke drifting over from another table.