El Saltador in Almeria in southern Spain is a beautifully restored farmhouse. H and I spent a week there at the end of July. It is in the middle of the deserts that the spaghetti westerns were filmed in.

Our flight from Stansted was delayed by 4 hours so we arrived after dark which is exactly what we didn’t want to do as we knew that the drive up to the farmhouse was along twisty roads high in the mountains. Unexpectedly the GPS that I bought with us took us straight to the location. There was a huge sense of relief when the headlights picked out the name of the village we were heading for when I thought that we were probably miles away. The hostess had some food luckily left over and we had bought a bottle of wine on the way, so after midnight we sat outside on the veranda with delicious beef and beautiful red wine.

We found a routine for the week, breakfast

followed by 2 or 3 hours of work (H) and meditation for me (I had just bought Mindfulness in Plain English). I had a whole hall to myself.

The coast was nearly an hour’s drive away.