Bedrock

Have you ever noticed how rarely things go to plan. We were supposed to arrive last night in Galera at a reasonable hour to meet the Les from Spanish Inland Properties (I’ll refer to them as SIP from now on) – as it happens, between being given the wrong car at the airport, driving rather cautiously after last time (wherein a jack-knifed truck hit us doing 70 on the motorway) and the sat-nav maps being out of date, we actually arrived in the village to pick up keys for our temporary accommodation just after midnight. Les took us to our accomodation and left us to what turned out to be a late night after we discovered a bottle of red in the fridge. We sat outside and chatted till 2am – clear night sky – t-shirt weather at night.

Friday: I was up first thing this morning and sat outside for an hour (sunny and luke warm) or so to catch up on emails thanks to the Vodafone card which I’ll have to use for the next two days. 10am this morning we headed off to town to go to the “Caja Rurul” bank to get our debit cards organised. It looked like pension day as there was a bunch of old folk getting paid cash. That went incredibly smoothly with the help of Sally from SIP and 15 minutes later we had our first debit card. Funny thing was I rushed outside to the cash machine to try it out and change the PIN number.. thoroughly expecting to see something like a “change language” button – well there was one – but the text was in Spanish of course!

Next stop the police station at BAZA to pick up our NIE numbers with the aid of an English-speaking Spanish solicitor. Again, a no-brainer – simply a matter of filling in forms and paying out money 🙂 By now it was well after lunchtime and the temperature was heading up toward 30 degrees C so doing anything strenuous was out of the question.

Having grabbed the keys for “Bedrock” in the morning – we headed back to Galera to take a look at our new property. As you might expect, we put together a short list of things that need fixing but generally it’s all ready – an empty shell with running water, electronicity and broadband – all the essentials.

The rural broadband isn’t fast but it works – I checked 450k download, 350k upload and it comes complete with an Internet phone and a decent high speed 4 way + wireless router.

Friday night we’re back at the rented accom, bbq on – it’s 10pm and still nice and warm so I have my bottle of diet fanta and a glass of wine… and tomorrow we’ve a clean up job to do in the new cave, then we’re off to buy some furniture. Can’t do too much as the delivery van from the UK isn’t turning up until Monday.