To cut a long and painful story short, we were going to Spain for a well-deserved break – now we’re going to Turkey instead! Turns out that the expiry date in your UK passport (in my case March next year) is irrelevant to our European cousins. In a recent spiteful and petty anti-Brexit reaction EU bureaucrats apparently created the ‘ten year rule’ which means your passport isn’t valid beyond ten years after the issue date – in my case early August. Having travelled down to Luton on Monday, spent the night in an hotel, parked the car for the week and checked in our luggage, ready for an early departure to Malaga yesterday morning, I was stopped at the gate and told I couldn’t fly. It took an age to retrieve our bags, collect the car and drive back home. Jane managed to cancel some accommodation but we’ve lost the money for the flights, car hire, parking and accommodation – three cheers for Brussels! Determined to do something with our precious week we looked for last minute breaks to non-European countries and Turkey came up trumps. We’re off tomorrow to Dalyan a lovely lake-side resort in the south-west of the country – a destination we last birded with a GPOG group back in 2007 – what could possibly go wrong! More news on this blog in due course…