Road trip

We headed out on our first road trip today.  It wasn't terribly far, and it wasn't to any place that was new to us, but it was nice to get out of town.

One of the first lessons that we learned on the road trip was that our GPS navigation is NOT user-friendly.  And when we finally were able to identify our alleged location, it appeared about 2 degrees of latitude south of our actual location (as determined by a Michelin road map).  Which put us in the Mediterranean Sea.  And using the GPS map function, we appeared to be in the sea.  That explains why on a close-up map view no roads were visible, just blue.

Our "location," east of Barcelona, according to the GPS

Our day trip was around the edge of the Etang du Vaccares, a big saltwater lagoon in the Camargue natural regional park, a marshy delta area around the Grand Rhone and the Petit Rhone.  The Camargue has lots of rice culture, and is famous for its white horses and bulls.

Camargue horses

We made lots of stops to look at a variety of birds.  The most spectacular sightings were a Squacco Heron and a Eurasian Hoopoe, birds that we unable to photograph.  We also saw plenty of flamingoes, some swans, stilts, egrets, ibises, avocets, terns, gulls, and dunlins (a sandpiper that occurs along the Pacific as well).

Flamingoes

Dunlins

Perhaps the oddest sight on our trek was one of the big white Camargue horses walking along the side of the road, accompanying a brown pony.  Someone is definitely going to be out looking for this odd couple.