Bedrock

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

It’s a weird feeling – I’ve not been without a barrage of email for over a decade – and here I am up a the top of a mountain – with no email! It’s quite nice actually! Today was painting day – I did my community work for the autumn (I hope nearby residents are reading this) and painted the steps. Note the plant is growing! Which means our watering system is working.. just need to hide the black pipe now.

When we all first came here, the place looked wonderful, everything was white – sadly due to crappy builders the white didn’t last long… I hope I’m starting to get to grips with this – the steps are a combination of Plastica paint and external plaster – only time will tell if it lasts… but it looks lovely for now! Took me most of the day (well, that and making a complete hash of the Plastica paint which is now set rock solid in the container! I’m off to Lidl tomorrow to see if I can get some more.

We have our new wall up and once my builder’s been back to straighten up the posts!!!  We’ll be fitting a gate and it’ll all look lovely.

A reminder below of how the place DID look like until a couple of weeks ago – way too open… well, it doesn’t look like that any more – once it’s been properly rendered and a couple of fixes done I’ll take another panorama with the new look to it! I’m still thinking we should move the pergola to where the door is to put a nice bit of shadow on the door…. which would leave enough room for a nice big pool!! But that might have to wait until next year.

It’s a quiet night – indeed – there is no-one here but me… I was out and about this morning giving Maureen (back in the UK) the video guided tour (she had the grandkids over one of whom was fascinated by the cave, the other is ..well, just that age where you mustn’t look TOO interested in anything) and I noted the complete absence of noise and people! I understand I’m to expect some company this week but I’m hoping the weather will keep up, I’m looking forward to a quiet spot of reading… and some nice wine of course. Got Val De Condez with me right now – a pleasant Rose, a break from my normal white.

I was beginning to think that today was going down the toilet.. I arrived at Newcastle airport just before lunch with in plenty of time for my plane, only to discover a distinct lack of people at the SleazyJet isle..  I mistakenly thought this might be to me coming over on my own, a week before the kids breakup – but NO, the sodding plane was late!  No apologies, nothing. To cut a long story short, the plane didn’t turn up until 3pm (after watching the 3-minute notice for 15 minutes as passenger-tension reached breaking point) so the plane actually set off something later than 3.30pm – still, having made to monumental decision to turn my work Email off for the duration, this gave me a couple of hours to read a book which was nice.

Arriving at Murcia Airport I was more than pleased to discover that even though the sun had gone down it was still 22C outside – VERY pleasant. Another slight screw-up with the car company who I will NEVER use again: when I told them I didn’t need their insurance as I had my own, they demanded £300 deposit, refundable on return of the car – which doesn’t say much about the honestly levels of their normal customers!! Anyway, by 9pm Spanish time I was off on my journeys. My favourite supermarket Eroski (St Javier) thankfully stops open until 10pm on Saturdays so I managed to get supplies in and off I went. The roads here by and large were a joy to drive, very little traffic in the last 50Km.

The new route we use around the back of Puebla De Don Fadrique only takes 2 hours so here I am having done minimal work in the house and after putting my lights out so they’ll charge in the morning, finishing off the blog. It’s around 16C inside the cave, maybe 11 degrees outside – not quite wine-sipping weather but pleasant for the time of year and MUCH warmer than it will be by now back in WARK. I noticed a spot of cloud on the way up but it’s all gone now and the stars are out in force.

More tomorrow, I plan a lie-in, some further reading and then perhaps a spot of light-fixing and even painting if I’m feeling up to it – don’t want to overdo things – it is a Sunday after all.  No Sky HD as Maureen has the card back at home so I’ll have to make due with a choice of thousands of radio stations – it’s a tough life. I have a week of peace and quiet then next Saturday Maureen is joining me for the school break.

I’ll post some pics of the new wall and the gates – but not until I’ve had my paintbrush out!

Not the prettiest sight right now, our new set of gates is in place, I can see a paint job coming on for me very soon. Next stop the new wall and it’s own gate and then some lighting… thank heavens for Pinctura Plastica.

I’ve just realised I’ve not been maintaining my Google photos properly – by default you needed a link to see most of them – so for those of you who want to see more photos – or better quality etc… head on over to http://picasaweb.google.com/peterscargill and they should all be there sorted into albums.

As promised in a previous blog, first thing on Friday morning, Maureen and I set off on the just-under-3-hour journey to Capileira, the most northerly of the 3 villages in the gorge of the Poqueira river in the Las Alpujaras district of the province of Granada.

The whole journey is interesting as, once you get past Granada you go through Lanjaron and other villages each with their own unique character and then start up the steep incline up the mountains to Capileira. Note in the map it LOOKS like Orgiva is on-route but actually you have to take a turnoff so that’ll have to wait for another day.

With temperatures rapidly approaching 40 degrees C we only briefly stopped off on the way at a restaurant in Calle de Eras Del Seleco in Lanjaron – you’ll see it in the new built-in street view in Google maps – simply says “restaurant” which we dubbed the “cafe for noisy people” as we couldn’t hear ourselves thing for most of the otherwise excellent lunch.

Once you get past Lanjaron you spend far more time going up and down mountains than travelling in a straight line so that part of the journey takes longer than it might at first seem. We encountered a road-slide where the entire right side of the road had simply dropped off into the valley – fortunately the road-crews had sorted out the mess before we got there.

Heading off it took us the best part of an hour to get up the mountains. Capileira is around 5000ft up but our hotel was even higher and about 1 km above Capileira. 

As we were in no rush we kept on going as I wanted to see just how high up we could go – but in the end, we gave up as the road went from superb to, well, something you might find on the moon perhaps – used only by logging trucks and insane cyclists but even then by the time Maureen finally insisted we turn around (the road at many points is on the edge of the mountain with very little between you and death) we were well in excess of 6,500ft above sea level – and it LOOKED that high. You have to do it once but take good tires with you.

The town is just superb and at multiple levels (as it’s up a mountain!) with lots of shops and restaurants to keep one busy and the whole feel of the place is very clean and of high quality (which is more than can be said of construction you might see elsewhere). One shop we went into had a very old wooden weaving loom in the back room and drink is cheap enough as you can see from the photo on the right. Maureen bought lots of bits and bobs and I bought a new t-shirt… well, you have to, don’t you.

The thing I can’t figure out is the snow on the mountains – we had temperatures of around 40 degrees C and going up to 6,000ft had no effect on that whatsoever – and yet – here’s the photographic evidence – snow – I just don’t see that peak being more than 8,000ft and yet…. there it is. I DID think it was just some kind of calcium but winter shots of the area show that peak being completely white.  If anyone knows the answer to this please do let us know.

The hotel – well, I’ll not say much here as we’ve already displayed our displeasure on the relevant travel website but when we got there after travelling up the only access path which was an assault course, all looked perfect – the pool overlooks the valley, it was wonderfully cool, scenery was great but the pool could have been cleaner and better maintained. A Spanish gentleman guy showed us to our room without giving any other information away.

The room was nice enough but FAR too hot and within seconds of opening the door we had a bunch of flies in there…

We headed off back down to the town and found in a small square a nice pizzeria simply called “La Pizzeria” and had a very pleasant pepperoni pizza – the Spanish aren’t that good generally at making pizza bases so this was most welcome. We spent the evening simply taking in the mountain air and enjoying a nice bottle of rose.

Back at the hotel after an enjoyable evening we got off to a bad start as one of the guests had far too much to drink and kept trying to sing – like us he probably had a room that was too hot and so with his door open we could hear him loud and clear.  After a very unsatisfactory sleeping night which included listening to presumably the same person throwing up in the morning… we got up at 8.30am only to see the very modern, efficient looking dining room empty and devoid of staff with last night’s dinner plates still scattered around, We simply left, vowing next time to go elsewhere – which given the potential is a great shame – maybe they’ll change in the future. We’ve been in touch to pay the bill but they’ve yet to come back to us.

The reason we came here on a Friday night was so we could travel back up through Guadix market which is held on a Saturday and that we did, arriving at Guadix around 11am.  Great market and large but a little short on food options (fried chicken or nothing) – as we’d had no breakfast this was important so we only stayed for an hour before heading off home, but not before Maureen bought a new quilt for the bed.

Note the spelling of “Lennon”….. just because someone CAN print on t-shirts doesn’t mean they SHOULD 🙂

and finally just outside of Guadix on the way back… a nice church…

Just in case you were wondering how one manages to write a blog in a cave!! – here I am at work this morning, I’ve been out with neighbour Richard’s ladder and touched up the tiles, I’ve been updating the blog (and having corrections fired at me by Maureen) of course this is totally portable and comes back to England with us.

Maureen is busy sorting out appointments and trying to work her way through the Iberbandits customer service department using her unintelligible Spanglish.  I’m now going to get on with the less than exciting job of drilling holes in walls to get the broadband sorted, having bought all the bits and pieces I need at Brico Depot yesterday. More later, I’ll show you before and after shots provided the cave doesn’t collapse in the process. Despite the weather forecast, it’s really nice outside – sun is blasting, I’m guessing it’s about 30 degrees and already I can feel the backs of my legs tightening up from the sun 🙂

Last night we were informed to not put our feet into any shoes without shaking them first as the scorpions come out of hiding during the rain!! Good tip!