All the reading I had done on the Schengen rules indicated that they might not check but they might so you definitely want to leave the Schengen countries before the 90 days are up. Gibraltar is owned by the UK which means it is out of Schengen, so on the 90th day I crossed over into Gibraltar - and all they had at the border was someone glancing at your passport as you held it out and walked past. So I circled back and said I needed a stamp because of Scheng...

I just spent a week in Rabat, Morocco in order to get a visa and so I figured that would give me lots of time to catch up the blog - but suddenly the week is over and here I am catching it up on the last night. The writeups might be short, but that is good news for those who aren't reading it and should be (and you know I mean!). I spent a few days in Malaga, a really nice town in the south of Spain, seeing some of the sights. I went on a tour of the Alcazab...

After leaving France I took the 8.6 km tunnel through the Pyrenees mountains to Zaragoza, Spain where I spent a couple of days. Then I took the high speed train to Malaga in the south, a regional train to Alora, then a drive into the hills on a dirt road which is actually the river bed (which becomes impassable in the spring when it rains). The HelpX Host has taken lots of photos of insects, so I spent the week learning the details of Picasa (a photo editing an...

I spent a wonderful week in Oloron, a town of 12,000 people in southern France just north of the Pyrenees mountains, another HelpX engagement. Oloron has a chocolate factor so you can often smell chocolate cooking throughout the town. Normally HelpX-ers here help with the large market garden or to build a dome-shaped greenhouse, but I had a really easy week with not much outside work so instead I did some cleaning inside. The Pyrnenees mountains can be seen mu...

After Bordeaux, I travelled down the coast to Bayonne and Biarritz, small surfing towns right on the ocean in southern France, then over the border to Spain to another small surfing town called San Sebastian. Lots of beautiful beaches and great swimming in the surf. San Sebastian has 2 beaches right in the city, one is a swimming beach (crowded with hundreds of people laying in the sun on a hot day) and one is a surfing beach (crowded with hundreds of surfers n...