We’ve arrived, without the children, who are being spoilt rotten by gran and grandpa, back in Spain for another 10 days. 🙂

We’ve been down to the pool in our gated urbanizacion for a refreshing swim after an early morning’s flight across England, the Bay of Biscay, France, the Pyrenees, and then most of Spain before landing, picking up our hire car and then driving up to the naturist ‘village’ of Vera Playa, a regular haunt of ours.

Pausing only to load up on provisions to see us through the rest of the day (and tomorrow’s breakfast), we got in unpacked, undressed (not necessarily in that order! 🙂 ) and then headed down to the pool of our urbanizacion during the afternoon lull. People still ‘siesta’ to some extent in early/mid afternoon. This particular urbanizacion is new to us (although we’ve previously sneakily used its pool!) and we have a breathtaking view of the sea from here. The RL Mr. Keng decided he would a) continue swimming without me and b) then head off for a bit of a walk, frustrated by most of a day spent sitting down in either an aeroplane or a car, leaving me to unpack the laptop and commence work on the next round of ‘postcards’.

One of the things I regularly notice is that single women use the beach a lot. Single men do too, but there’s no real sense of this being some ‘pick up’ haunt. Instead, there’s a refreshing sense of naturism being no big deal. People are naked, who cares? Women can choose to plank themselves down on the sand and enjoy the late afternoon sunshine unmolested. No one is going up to them and saying ‘hi’ in a creepy or unwanted manner.

That’s one of the things it’s not easy to do in SL. A trip to a naturist beach will inevitably come with the attentions of male avatars who will feel it incumbent on them to say ‘hi’ from 200m distance, so that you can’t even see them! Sometimes the conversation is pleasant, sometimes unwanted. Slightly different in the real world, where the single women I can observe from here are merrily sunbathing or reading. The sun is the thing. Their book is the thing. The concept of ‘company’ isn’t foremost on their, or the males nearby, minds.

Ella.