The longest journey begins with the first step..........

Wednesday 20th Sept; First thing today we took back the heap of a hire car that was falling apart with the tracking all over the place and half the Islands' beaches in the boot. After a very heated discussion with our old pal (Danny Devito's double) from the cambio we agreed to look at a possible replacement but as both of the replacements were worse than the original we agreed to go away if he would give us all our money back. After we had satisfied him that this in no way impugned his integrity or his business practices he relented and paid us in full. As we hadn't put any petrol in the thing and had ridden round in it for a day and a half we felt that we had been adequately compensated for having to drive around in a virtual death trap. Sadly although we all shook hands I don't think we are still the friends that I thought we were. Around midday we went with our good West Country friends into town to have coffee and croissants and purchase meat for yet another evening barbeque at the complex. For lunch we all went to a restaurant overlooking the bay at Sanacra and had fresh grilled sardines as we watched the trainee scuba divers head out to sea.

My deed for this day was to keep cool in front of a very excitable and diminutive Spaniard who also contributed to my tally of human contacts. My thoughts were on the wisdom of mixing friendship and business which would seem to be on a par with mixing oil and water.