Discarding some travel supplements

[shewhomust]

But not before extracting all the juicy goodness from them! So we have:

• Walking in Spain's volcanic region (just across the Pyrenees, in Catalonia).



• The white villages of Andalucia - perhaps a Carmen-themed converted olive mill is a little precious?



• The Vallé Française, in the Cévennes. Lucy Wadham, who lives there, writes: "Part of me is still wondering why, at the age of 43, I suddenly decided to uproot from a comfortable life in central Paris and move to a part of France so wild and so remote that even my best-educated Parisian friends, who had no difficulty rattling off the obscurest capital cities, were unable to locate it on the map. They knew that the Lozère, the part of the Cévennes where I would henceforth be paying my taxes, was the most sparsely populated départment in France... It is therefore of little surprise to me that, two years on, none of my Parisian friends has paid a visit." I love the Lozère, which reminds me in many ways of Weardale - here, have a photo...



• The same issue of The Guardian prints readers' recommendations of vineyards to visit: La Brillane, in Provence, is organic and offers B & B; the Domaine de la Citadelle, in Ménerbes, has a corkscrew museum; Château Villerambert-Julien is in the Minervois; Trois Terres in the Hérault has a very attractive web site - don't be fooled by the offer of an English text, the button leads to an 'under construction' message (odd, since the proprietor is English...), but the photographs work in any language; Domaine Mousset, at Le Fel in the Aveyron takes us back to the south west, which works for me...

All of which is irrelevant to our immediate plans: on Wednesday we set off for the Northern Isles - train to Aberdeen, overnight ferry to Lerwick, smaller ferry (the Good Shepherd) to Fair Isle. I should have internet access some of the time, but I may not have much time to use it...