Up to a lovely day. Sunny and warm, in the high teens. We
packed ourselves a picnic lunch, picked up a couple of skinny baguettes and
headed out of town on foot to the west to climb up to Hermitage Sant Ferreol.
This is a little monastery founded in the 13th century. The track
leaves from the Pont du Diable, which when it was built in the 1300s was the
longest single span stone bridge in at least Europe. The track took us up roads
moderately high above the valley floor, then swung round to deliver us to the
monastery about lunchtime. A lovely view from there. We are still surprised at
how big Céret is. The centre is very dense and old, a little like us perhaps,
but there is quite a spread outside the core, again a bit like us. We expect that is why there is a
good range of services available. The valley floor and the plains around here
are a network of smaller villages, mostly quite a bit smaller than ours.
The Hermitage itself was lovely but not amazing, but the
site is superb and it made for a very relaxing and pleasant walk. A few
families and couples at the top, and a group of 4-wheelers at one point. Lunch
was delicious, then a pleasant walk back down through bush tracks to Céret.
There is a scattering of nice houses throughout the hills – some old mas or farm houses, and some newer.
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| Spring flowers in the cherry orchards |
I got down to some serious work for the afternoon,
unfortunately taking me right into the evening, when an upload session proved
that more was needed, and apart from dinner, I worked through to 11:30pm. Not a
great way to end the weekend. However one major advance – I tried to re-enable
my new SIM card that I’d been anxiously waiting to be “provisioned” and it
worked this time! Wow, another working phone. Mucked around for a fair while
trying to make it work on the internet without success, so I thought I’d leave
it to morning to sort.
