At the end of this week "Inter-Provincial Travel" opens up again here in Spain. For a while now IP Travel has been restricted - meaning that although local businesses that wanted to could be (and generally have been) open, their customers have all only come from within their own province. In our case "Aragon". I've been talking to local owners and for a lot of them the off-season has been no different to any other year. Those that normally close, closed as normal. Businesses that are usually open and quite busy over our Winter season have seen less customers due to the restrictions but it has been partly balanced out by people from our own province who would normally go to another province for a week or long weekend winter break and couldn't. They came here instead :-) There's no doubt that numbers are down, but given the circumstances, it's not been as bad for most of the people I interact with as it could have been. The campsite that I sometimes work at decided not to open until IP Travel was allowed - they felt that the numbers of people likely to visit at this time didn't balance with the cost of opening and running the whole site. All the usual prep work we do has still needed doing and for me personally this year has been the same as previous years thankfully. The only difference being that where 2 or 3 of us normally get everything done by Easter for opening, I've been working pretty much on my own over the longer period of time that we've had to get everything done. Let's see how the next few weeks go!
