Time flies and it seems, so do we. Since we arrived in England at the end of March we have spent time in the Derbyshire Dales with family where Lorna got to muck about with horses, ducks, chickens rabbits and the cats, when they felt like it.

Lorna spent a day with an school friend around Chatsworth Park, one of the many Stately homes that are found in England. Chatsworth is the home of the Duke of Devonshire and has been home to the Cavendish family since 1549. Chatsworth is also where the type of banana (known as the Cavendish variety) that we normally eat, descended from when Chatsworth’s gardener, Joseph Paxton, in 1835 managed to cultivate them. Plants from Chatsworth were later sent via a missionary named John William to Samoa. Only one plant survived the journey and that single specimen was the forebear of bananas that flourish in Samoa and other parts of the world today.

From there we drove on to Fife in Scotland for some more visiting and then headed south to catch the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao in Northern Spain. Twenty fours hours on the ferry and then a 520 miles drive south to Nadadouro in Portugal where we plan to stay for a few months.