The last few weeks in Fuengirola have flown past and we have been soaking up the sunshine and heat like solar panels getting ready for the iceage. We've been planning our jaunt to Romania (currently not in the Schengen zone) and keeping an eye on their weather. Since the last blog (when they were getting -23 overnight), we are happy to say Bucharest has warmed up considerably. Some days they reach 0 or even 3 degrees with sunshine. The overnight low when we get there this coming Thursday evening is forecast to be -11. Much warmer then. There's not a lot of news in these parts - unless you count SNOW! This past week parts of southern Spain have been blanketed in snow for the first time in decades (like 60+ years!). Now we can't say the Costa del Sol copped it - but there were a couple of days when we simply hibernated. It was only 6 degrees during the day. That is unheard of (doesn't even get that cold at night). We took a break from watching 5 straight seasons of 'Call the Midwife' on Netflix and poked our noses out to take a look. It felt like the strong wind was coming right off the snow. Then we looked up the hills and saw it was true - there was snow on the peaks above Mijas. Now this period of coldness was certainly a shock to the system, but a mere two days later we trundled down to the beach to try a new Fish & Chip shop. There are only two official F&C joints in town and it's a sad fact that the newcomer is suffering on Tripadvisor at the hands of some troll who went there once and gave them a bad review. So bad he felt compelled to go again... just to give them another horrendous review. Says a lot for the owners of the original shop, particularly in an area choc 'a' block with UK ex-pats, that they feel threatened by a single competitor. Anyway - we tried the new guys and took our battered sausage and fish and chips down to the beach, sat on the sand, and watched the sun sparkling on the Mediterranean. And roasted in 20 odd degrees. The difference two days made was phenomenal. To the point that if we leave for our jaunt to the Tuesday or Saturday market we can be relied to to be wearing a t-shirt (for the heat), covered with a jumper (for the cold) and possibly a rain-parka (if it's really cold and cloudy and rain threatens) and carrying a sun-hat, sun-glasses and scarf (either for the cold or to rest on the sand). And if that sounds like an overreaction to the changeable weather, it's not. We usually end up using every single item. We've been for the odd 3 course lunch or breakfast outing, taken lots of long walks on the beach and our weekly markets have been fun, as usual. Not so fun is the though of packing for the most extreme winter either of us have seen. Aside from anything else, we'll be trotting about Romania for six weeks and quite often staying in Air BNB apartments with stairs... so need warm clothes - but not so much we'll injure ourselves getting the packs up the stairs. So in short, we've spent the last couple of weeks weeding most summer clothes and extra bits and bobs out of our collections to send home. Only thing worse than packing is queueing up at the Post Office for posting. On second thought... nothing's worse than packing.