129. Celebrating something

CONIL DE LA FRONTERA, CADIZ, SPAIN

Great excitement today for the St. Sebastian festival parade. From what I can discern this is where the locals parade with horses and floats and drink their way from Conil to a park about five kilometres away, stoping at this campsite forecourt to regroup and have lunch. The campsite is locked with only foot access and the friendly caretaker on the gate, whom we all know. The celebration started arriving at about ten thirty and there turned out that the parade was about a kilometre long. From observation the respectables arrived on horseback with family in carriages. Highly refined and elegant they were friendly but maintained the necessary distance as reflected their station, drinking elegantly upon high.

Gradually horse drawn gave way to tractors and singing and dancing made way for blasting PAs the last floats blasting pop hits re-karoked into Spanish with the corresponding drongos and young in tow carrying their cardboard wine casks. My guess is that there were twenty or thirty floats in total.

It was a fabulous atmosphere and a real surprise down here in the south of Spain is how mono-cultural the population is particularly considering how close we are to Africa, virtually in sight. The population here makes Christchurch's population diverse, by contrast.

My dad had this exact tractor - wonderful

Stood watching the parade for a couple of hours with Matthew and Claire until tottering back into camp for lunch with museum back. Matthew and Claire joined us for the afternoon even though they were leaving for Gibraltar*. They are then heading into the Algarve to join friends for a couple of weeks then hopefully joining us in Morocco mid February. We will miss them and Roman will certainly miss Edward.

Roman keen on emptying grey water

After Matthew and Claire left I tackled the Disco EGR valve installation and got the starboard side finished using a bolt from the other side. Unable to work out how to remove the port side I consulted forums which state that EGR valve replacement is tricky and the left side extremely tricky recommending that the offending exhaust running past the EGR valve be levered aside while replacing.  I cry uncle and am going to get a man to do it.

Simple holiday = simple play
Brown Bunny - Fyfe
Pink Bunny - Audrey
Barnaby - Iris

Tomorrow I will bike into Conil and attempt to get a suitable replacement bolt for the one I lost.

Absolutely loving Iggy Confidential on BBC iPlayer Radio 6. A breath of fresh air with an eclectic mix. Thank you Matthew for the recommendation, great parting gift..

*Roman calls it Travolter which delights - long may it last