Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 19th of July and I want to talk about heat and the extreme heat wave which has been sweeping across southern Europe or indeed you might say parking itself above southern Europe.

You will be aware that as the busiest summer getaway since 2019 is well underway,

people in southern Europe are experiencing extremely high temperatures.

As I look at the charts today, Sardinia, that beautiful

second island of Italy is expecting to hit 47. Yesterday it was the turn of Mayorka in Spain with

43 in the northeastern coast, which contains the great res results of Alcudia and Porta Balencia.

Therefore, people are concerned, or at least some of them are.

I've been looking at what your rights are if you are looking at the thermometer and thinking,

I don't want to go there.

And there's various reasons why you might do that.

First of all, you might think, well, it's not gonna be any fun.

I was in Rome this time last year,

and it wasn't excessive heat at all.

And even then, just going through the Italian capital and felt pretty grueling, partly because, of course, there were so many tourists doing exactly the same.

In a perfect world, you and I, I think, would both decide, okay, you need to emulate the way that they do things in these countries.

So the whole idea of a siesta, of course, is to keep out of the warmest part of the day,

from kind of lunchtime to later afternoon.

But that doesn't necessarily square with people's idea of a holiday.

And with, for example, the Acropolis in Athens closing for several days during the middle of the day and the late afternoon,

well, it just gives you an impression that you're not going to be able to have much fun.

Having said that, there are indications that people don't care. I haven't actually

had that many contacts from people saying we are desperate to change our plans, but there may be

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