Yesterday, in the high Pyrenees.

Being a large (the polite French term for fat ) man of un certain age (French for old) I now consume a certain amount of drugs every day to keep me ticking over.
I have discovered that these are available in Spain for a far cheaper price than either in Ireland or France so, every three months or so, we make a drug running trip to Spain, not a huge ordeal as it is only about an hour and a half away.
The frontier town is La Jonquera which is, like all frontier towns , fairly depressing, with its supermarkets full of French people buying trolly loads of olive oil and booze (mainly booze) so we have gone further to Figueres , Salvador Daliville , and that has a certain charm but to be honest I can only stomach a certain amount of these melting clocks.

This time I decided to build our trip around a good lunch and found a restaurant in Banyuls , within our cachement area , which had the elusive Michelin Bib Gourmand .

Drugs successfully purchased we eventually found the Quatre Estacions where we went for their tasting menu- which was €30 a head , for what turned out to be, an eight course meal.
We were served a little amuse bouche to start of a little vol au vent of fish which was delicious , we then had a good artichoke and fish soup , then some deep fried battered scallions with a romesco sauce which was crisp and piquant.
Then we had some sea-urchins served in the shell with a cheese sauce (a speciality of the house Madame told us ) which we thought a little too cheesy and not fishy enough. After this (Yes!) we had a perfectly delicious and perfectly cooked fillet of sea bream served simply with olive oil and crisp little pieces of sweet fried garlic. Then we had the main course , a cheek of veal , cooked butter tender but rather spoiled for us by an overly intense reduction sauce . We finished up with a selection plate of desserts which were fairly ordinary but which, to our shame we polished off anyway.
The bottle of wine which Madame recommended was €9.00 and local, our coffees were an extra €1.60 each , our sparkling waters compris.
We felt we had got extremely good value for money.

Some demon then got into us and rather than going home on the motorway we decided to climb up through the high passes of the Pyrenees and go back to France via Mollo (in Spain ) and Prats de Mollo ( in France).
It was a bit of a knuckle whitener of a ride which Síle took the wheel for.
We went through a lot of snow on the road side and I was very aware of the drop from the side of the road into the valley below.
At one stage an eagle flew right over the car , I think he thought we might be encroaching into his territory.
The journey of course took far longer than expected and our two hour journey out became a five hour trip home.