It’s rolled around far too quickly….. our last day for this visit. We will come back in the late autumn but for now we are leaving Villa Rockheart to the enjoyment of our guests over the next 6 months. There are still some weeks available that I hope we may fill. We have to make the house work for it’s upkeep!!!! We always do upgrades to the house every time we come, always trying to improve and enhance it. Not to mention the little jobs that any property builds up over the course of the winter…. Big jobs we’ve done this time are: re-upholstering two sofas, painting the lounge and dining room, replacing and repositioning the dining terrace wall lights, hanging the gourd lamps on the dining terrace, installing new watering lines around the garden, planting the orchard slope with ground-cover plants, new mattress in the master bedroom, new vacuum cleaner, new couch on the dining terrace, new cushions on the garden furniture, new dishwasher….. Phew….. but it’s all been worth it. We are so proud of this house. And in all honesty, I can say that considering the past two years that most of us have endured, I can’t think of a nicer place to dip a toe in the holiday water again!!! We love it here.

We spent the morning putting away our private belongings and re-checking the water lines around the garden, watering all the container plants….. Bob fitted the sign to the post at the end of the drive. Then we packed the suitcases, weighed them… juggled a bit…. all ok…

The garden is really coming into its full summer beauty, lots of the shrubs are in flower, the bottlebrush trees are well on the way, their little red brushes covering the cascading branches. I do love them.

We checked in for our Turkish Airways flights to Gatwick smoothly enough. No one’s computer systems are state of the art at the moment. Too many people laid off in the pandemic and reluctant to come back to work at 2020 wages…. anyway, we got good seats. We really like Turkish Airways and we always choose them. Yes, you have to change planes in Istanbul but as long as you choose a connection of less than 2 hours, that can be a plus. The new IST airport is fabulous. So many shops, cafes, bars, lots and lots of seating. It’s a pleasure to visit. And TA are great in the air, fly a very modern fleet, and give you great food on both legs, drinks service… gosh, BA could learn a thing or two…. The big plus of flying into Ercan from Istanbul is of course that you are already in North Cyprus and only about 35 minutes from the villa. I do understand why some guests fly direct from the UK into Larnaca and transfer north, but it’s not my first choice. I don’t enjoy a 4-5 hour low cost flight. And BA operate flights of that duration as low cost, so you might as well fly Easyjet or Wizz. That’s just my opinion. As the Queen says…. some remembrances may differ…..

Tonight we went to the Dogus Adres restaurant by the sea in Karaoglanoglu. We’ve been coming here for 14 years ever since it was in its original incarnation of The Address. The head waiter is such a nice chap and he always remembers us and makes a bit of a fuss. Tonight the restaurant was full of family groups celebrating Bayram (Eid) and the end of Ramadan. A good atmosphere. It is traditional Cypriot food and there’s a lot of it. We always choose an a la carte main meal which comes with a cold meze of tsatiki, hummus, tahini, bulgar wheat salad, olives, bread, green salad and also hot meze of cheese garlic bread, spicy potato slices, chips before the main. Then afterwards you can help yourself to a dessert table…. We never get that far…. God knows you must need to be hungry to go for the full meze here…. I had fillet steak with blue cheese and mushroom sauce which came with mixed vegetables and nutmeg creamed potatoes. Absolutely divine. Cooked perfectly blue as I ordered it. Bob had a pepper steak which he said was equally great. The head waiter brought me a special glass of shiraz which he said was his favourite wine – it was delicious and I was a bit surprised to see it was a Cypriot wine from the south – quite a mouthful. I would certainly have it again. We ended with Turkish coffee. The bill for all this – Bob had a beer and I had two glasses of the wine (well, it would have been rude not to) and we had a bottle of water – was £30 with tip. Outstanding and a fitting end to our holiday.