We arrived on Wednesday evening and left on Sunday morning, and over the three days and four nights we spent our time eating, drinking and driving around sightseeing.

We had a day in St. Emilion, which is a lovely old town with narrow cobbled streets, steep hills and lots of vineyards. There we sampled some of the local vino, had a gorgeous meal in Les Giron’dines and generally had a nice time for ourselves. We visited one of the many wineries outside the town and discovered the tunnels that run under the entire area which were built by hand years ago, but which are now used for storing wine during the fermenting process.

Another day was spend in Bordeaux, shopping and strolling around. It’s a nice city, but I was glad we had based ourselves in the country instead as we saw a bit more of the region. On our third and final full day, the sun came out from behind the clouds so we spent the day by the pool. That evening we went into Bergerac for another lovely meal in L’Imparfait. Bergerac is a small and pretty city, close to many vineyards and perfect for a hassle-free weekend break.

Chateau de Vigiers is a golfers paradise, and I would recommend it to any non-fussy eaters with deep pockets and a love of golf, foie gras and French wine. It was definitely relaxing for us non-golfers also, but I’m not sure its worth the normal rates they charge – we availed of an offer of €100 per night per room, which was pretty good value. The main consideration is that you definitely need a car, as it’s in the middle of nowhere and the restaurants on site have limited menus and are on the expensive side. We ate there two nights out of four and the food was good, but the menu was definitely geared to local tastes which resulted in us eating foie gras, venison and rabbit.

Overall we had a lovely relaxing time in France, stuffing our faces with rich food and good wine and soaking up all that sunshine we have been deprived of this summer in dear old Ireland.

We started our trip in Barcelona where we’d prebooked the Jazz hotel for three nights. It was pretty good value (about €100 per night) and had a high rating on trip advisor, but we were a bit disappointed when we got there because it was a bit worn and had a sterile, ‘businessy’ feel about it. We’d stayed in some real hovels when we were away, but wanted our honeymoon to be special so the first thing we did after eating some dodgy tapas across the road was look up some decent hotels and change our booking for the next two nights to the Abac. Good decision.

After a much needed full nights sleep, we went for a stroll around Las Ramblas, one of the main drags of Barcelona. Like the main drags of most other european countries, there wasn’t anything too exciting to see until we got to la Mercat de la Boqueria, a great food market just a stone’s throw from the main street. We wanted to get some real tapas after the previous nights attempt, so headed for the stall with the biggest concentration of locals (it was called Bar Boqueria). After a lot of dishes and a mooch around the other stalls (markets are somewhere we can both spend hours looking around, even when they only sell food!), we got a taxi up to the Zona Alta to our fancy new (expensive!) home for the next few nights, the lovely Hotel Abac.

The Abac is a fifteen room boutique hotel that was built to provide rooms for customers of its two Michelin-starred restaurant; it’s a haven of white and wood and the kind of place you don’t really want to leave when you’re there. It took us a while to figure out how the room ‘worked’, there was only one solid wall for instance, the rest were made of glass and had remote controlled curtains to give you your privacy. The remote also controlled the lighting and heating. The bathroom didn’t have a shower, or so we thought until we found out that the entire ceiling was a rainforest shower. All of the electronic equipment in the room was Bang and Olufsen, the toiletries were Hermes. I’d never been in such a place before, it was a techophiles dream :-)

We ventured down to find the underground spa that we’d read about and found out that it was for the exclusive use of two people at a time. We lounged about on the hot seats, the pool and the fart seats that Riona found a button somewhere for. It was bliss. I could have stayed inside that hotel for the rest of our week and went home happy!

We did get out an explore more of Barcelona though and bought a two day tour bus pass. I didn’t realise how big a city it was, not somewhere you could explore on foot unless you have lots of time. We took in most of the highlights, were a little bit disappointed with Gaudi’s Park Guell but blown away by La Sagrada Familia. We also managed to do lots of good eating – it was one of the aims of our honeymoon. Friends had prearranged dinner for us in a great seafood restaurant, La Bota Fumeiro as a great wedding present and we had a delicious asian tasting menu in Con Gracia that consisted of about nine courses in all, with different wines accompanying a lot of them. After a gluttenous three days in Barcelona, we picked up a rental car and headed north for Emporda, our second port of call.

We’d managed to get this booking right. We’d made a reservation for Castell d’Emporda based mostly on its website and it didn’t disappoint. We paid around €100 per night bed and breakfast which was excellent value. The hotel is a restored castle in the middle of the countryside, about ten miles from the coast. The grounds overlook a beautiful green countryside, something that didn’t meet my sterotype of a dry, arid Spain.

The biggest attraction with the Emporda region is the amount of medieval towns scattered around the place, just waiting to be explored. Most of the ones we came across were almost deserted, it was like being in the south of France without the crowds or the expense.

The north west region of Spain around Girona is probably best known for it’s most famous son, Salvador Dali. We were on the edge of the ‘Dali Triangle’, a trio of museums in three different towns in the area. We managed to visit two of them, his muse Gala’s house castle, Castell de Pubol and Dali’s own museum that he opened himself in 1974 in Figueres.

Castell de Pubol was a place that Dali created for Gala that he put off limits to himself unless invited. The furniture and collections of paintings and other tat are fantastic, they reminded us of a cross between Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso in Chile and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory. Gala herself is buried in the crypt of the castle, overlooked by statues of a giraffe, some horseheads and a human torso.

Dali’s Thatre Museu in Figueres contains more of Dali’s work than Gala’s castle, but a lot of other art that he collected also. Because we were running out of time, we visited both museums on the same day which I wouldn’t advise as it’s a lot of weird shit to take in in one day especially with all the giraffe-ladies and doll-heads.

An example of one of the rooms in the museum is the Mae West Room. you can see that the room is laid out as her face, but when you climb up a ladder at one end of the room and look through a large lens, all of the elements come together to give the real effect. It’s pretty cool!

We had a great week in Catalonia. Spain is somewhere that we both want to return to, there seems to be some much to the country once you stay away from the tack and trouble of the resorts. It was nice to practice our Spanish again too. If you’re looking for somewhere that’s reasonable to get to and full of rich culture, great food and fantastic scenery, you can’t go wrong with Catalonia.

Mary was one of the most generous, selfless people I´ve had the pleasure of knowing. Her bright smile rarely faded, no matter what she was going through, and she always put others before herself. One of the last times I saw her, in the Mater hospital a month or so before we left, I remember being moved about how excited she was for our plans of travelling and moving to the West, a place that she had spent a lot of time paddling in over the years. She thrived on seeing other people happy.

Mary enjoyed life to the full whenever she could. She was a long time kayaker and loved travelling – she´d been to Central America herself (drawn there by the whitewater rafting!) and had spent time trekking in the Himalayas. She enjoyed her skiing and continued to go on skiing holidays with her brothers and friends to soak up the atmosphere even when she didn´t have the strength to partake. In recent months, when she didn´t have the energy to read, she´d have my mum print out the latest stories from this blog and read them out to her (it was great to know that someone was reading it!).

It´s hard being away from home when something like this happens. It would have been nice to be home to see her off but Mary wouldn´t have wanted that. We decided to remember her in our own way and went rafting, something that she certainly would have approved of! It felt right.

We´ll miss you Mary, rest in peace.

• The food: Its been good mostly, especially in Indonesia, where we were well fed on rice with tasty veggie dishes and lots of fish. Eddie has discovered he actually likes most fish and is now a committed tuna lover. You get gorgeous banana pancakes for breakfast everywhere in Indo, often followed by fresh fruit, so it quickly became our favorite meal of the day! Here in Malyasia, the food’s been grand but generally not as tasty as Indo. And almost everything we’ve eaten here has been greasy. They like to fry.  So we’re probably piling on the pounds. But still, I just had a tiger prawn curry and it was extremely tasty! Not too fatty either I suspect, but it was relatively expensive at an extravagant €4. Its very hard to stick to a budget here; when its the difference between €2 or €4 you tend to think what the heck, let’s go for something nice!
• The ailments: Yes there has been a wee bit of vomit, diarrhoea and constipation but then it passes and is quickly forgotten. Thankfully, we haven’t had anything more serious, but we have been careful to avoid any really dodgy-looking food places/stalls. There’s also been lots of swollen itchy mozzie bites (mainly on me), and a bit of severe sunburn owing to our anti-Malaria medication which makes us burn easier. But all in all, we’re holding up well. Really, don’t feel too sorry for us…
• The accommodation:  I have to say we’ve been pretty good to ourselves. Again when the choice is the difference of 4 or 5 euro we tend to say’ what the heck, let’s not stay in a dorm’/ ‘let’s have hot, fresh water’ / ‘let’s have air con or at least a decent fan’. In general, its been cheap and cheerful, but clean(ish). There’s been some fab places intermittently which I have mentioned along the way, mainly to recommend to anyone who happens upon this blog who is travelling the same road (and its well travelled – we have met the same couple three times by pure co-incidence since we got to Borneo).