Super Happy sunday 12th July - meeting Nanouke!

This past sunday (12th July) I had the enormous pleasure of meeting up with fellow Etsyian, Ana a.k.a Nanouke .. for those of you that have 'met' her virtually she is exactly as how she appears on Etsy, fun, lovely, caring, gorgeous and so terribly funny!

I left home around 10am (meant to be away earlier but overslept) and headed off in the direction of Lisbon .. 2 hours later I arrived in Ana's home town of Torres de Vedras and oops, accidently took the north exit instead of the south exit but never mind .. she came to my rescue!

We headed off to a café to sit and have a little chat. Mitsy a.k.a ArtMind had posted to me a little pressie to give Ana (I so keep wanting to call her Nanouke .. and the poor darling did get me calling her that throughout our day together). Here is Ana opening her surprise from Mitsy at the café where we sat and chatted for a while:

We got into Ana's car and headed off to the beach area of Santa Cruz .. to have a beautiful wander around this gorgeous seaside village (which by the way is one of Ana's favourite beaches)

It was an absolutely pleasantly warm to hot day .. enough to be hot but there were little cooler breezes around to cool you down a little.

We decided to walk down to this rock shown here in the water (it has a giant hole in it)

Here's Ana showing us her beautiful brooch from Mitsy and also you can see the hole in the rock behind her .. and the just beautiful beach area of Santa Cruz.

Ah huh .. we managed to ask this dear older woman to take our photo together .. after 4 or 5 attempts she managed to take this photo of us without chopping our heads off :)

The hole in the rock, rock. You see, i was thoroughly fortunate to be with Ana on this day as she was able to give me a geology lesson and tell me about how these rock formations (and hills to the side) are around 40 million years old and instead of being slanted as they are now they used to lie flat ... she's really brainy about all this!!!

This is a delightful little church that we saw in our wandering through the village of Santa Cruz.

We spent around 7.5 hours together .. chatting, chatting, laughing and chatting and laughing some more. I had the BEST day with Ana .. it was so wonderful to have this opportunity to meet her.

Ana knitted me the most beautiful bracelet .. I haven't taken the photo's of it yet (shame on me) but when I do I shall be sharing this with you as well .. it's extremely elegant and beautiful! Thank you so much Ana.

Towards the end of the day we sat up on a little hill overlooking the sea and watched the beginnings of the sun set ... we talked about so many wonderful things .. ha ha especially etsy (which is most likely no great surprise to you all) .. but not just that, about our lives, our families, our friends .. all of it perfectly natural and special. In so many ways it was like meeting up with an old friend even though this was our first meeting.

A big and enormous hug Ana, thanks so much for making my sunday one of the highlights of my 7 years here in Portugal .. I hope that we'll do this again before too long.

Just one more thing to add. The portuguese people are a truly lovely and caring 'race' of people, Ana is no exception to this but she has that something extra, extra warmth and zest.

Hugs and beijinhos, Kerrin xox