Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

And here we are once again in Spain, the start of hopefully a beautiful summer. The crossing was uneventful, other than THREE charging us ridiculous sums for data while on the boat.

Our trip to Bilbao turned out to be a trip to Santander (near enough) from which we travelled down to somewhere we’d never been to before – Burgos, stopping at a small hotel on the outskirts of town on Calle Don Juan De Austria.

Burgos itself has lots to offer including a fantastic cathedral. As we were only stopping overnight, we went into town first thing in the morning and took a look at the cathedral but it really is going to need a separate trip (bearing in mind we had 3 cats in the back of the car).

Also even with the sun out it was not quite t-shirt weather so despite the attractions we were as keen to get back into the warm car. Maybe later in the year.

From there we drove down to Galera, arriving late afternoon – I think something like 7 hours (plus 2 hours to get to Burgos in the first place).

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Our first trip of the year to Galera could have gotten off to a better start – because of the relatively short duration of this stay to set up the place for our much longer stay this year, we flew over.

Well, I don’t know why, but Newcastle Airport more closely resembled a cattle market on Friday morning. The length of the queues for customs was un-believable – I’d hate to have bad legs….

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We have just enjoyed two days in the north of Spain in the province of Aragon in the village of Valderrobres and just now arrived home back home to the sun.

Valderrobres is a charming and quaint mediaeval village that sits in an unspoilt area in the mountains of Aragon. The village comes complete with cobblestone streets, knobbly old oak doors and a considerable amount of EU funded resurrection.

We were visiting the area to see our friends Aidan and Helen who are buying a sizeable portion of land in order to resurrect an old ruined building and build a new home there for the summer months.

The area is totally off-grid and so we expect to see some impressive solar power there in the near future as Aidan, like myself, is particularly fond of the idea. Having managed to source the panel importers he has secured good pricing on the 250w units so I expect lots of it. A side effect of this means that next year I will be able to almost quadruple the solar power at our cave which I’m really looking forward to. I’ll test one of the 250w units in the UK but in the Northeast of England I’ll be lucky to get enough to light one bulb most of the time.

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Well, that’s possibly a slight exaggeration, but first thing this morning as Maureen and I walked down to the village for coffee, it was (as it was yesterday first thing) noticeably cooler.

Of course – that didn’t last long and by lunchtime it was, once again too hot to do outside work – but the signs are there. Another few weeks and the trees will start the magical process of turning through orange to bright yellow before going to sleep for the winter – and here in this part of Spain I mean BRIGHT yellow.

We’re off to Seville this month so I’m hoping winter doesn’t come TOO quickly – I’m sure it won’t but it certainly would be nice if it was cool enough to walk around all day. In August, visiting a big city like Seville would not have been a lot of fun.

Meanwhile we’ve been getting jobs around the house and garden done, I’ve put together a new media centre with a considerable amount of memory (now putting together a second unit for my own TV in the office) and we’ve been painting the area from the roundabout upwards to make it all look more spiffy.

We’ve had a few quiet days now the August festivities are over. Not so the summer however, it has been very hot here touching on 40c from time to time. We had some showers in the middle of all of that but they never last long. Hiding from the sun has given me ample time to get some mor home control experiments done – all of which is blogged elsewhere – and to start off the new photography blog. Yesterday we headed off to Orce pool for a dip which was excellent and then last night we had an unexpected trip down to see our neighbours – as always, lots of fun and involved lots of Cava.

So today we are off to Almeria – the reason being we’re dropping a couple of friends off at the airport (which we’ve never used). On our last expedition we did much of the coast to the right of Almeria, From all the way up at Vera, through Garrucha, Mojacar, Carboneras, Las Negras, San Jose, San Miguel etc. but by the time we got to Almeria, we headed straight up the main road to home as it was getting late.

This time we get to check out Almeria and beyond. We’ve also been to Motril and various places through Nerja (which is wonderful) and on to and beyond  Malaga and Marbella – but right now there’s a gap in our experiences from Almeria to Motril – hopefully we’ll fill that gap this time. Expected temperatures around 35c so no doubt we will end up in water at some point…

Been very quiet since our friend Simon left. Maureen and I headed off to Albox on Saturday to go to the hardware store there for some bits and pieces. We happened to go to the market while we were there (Saturday – I would not say it’s an up-market market – but it’s fairly big and there are some gems if you can spot them) and noticed some chairs going cheap – and the result – they are now in our new Pergola – and saved us a trip to Vera where we’d originally planned to go for chairs.

Yesterday was HOT and I got some work done but we eventually just ended up in town with friends at the Music bar for their new tapas evening – I have to say, quantity-wise – sorry – not impressed. Nothing wrong with the food but most of us were left wanting and when I ended up at the bar near the end of the night – a glass of wine seemed to have shot up by nearly 50%  – needless to say I left and ended up at, of all places, La Posa bar. Maureen caught up with me and we ended up walking home up that steep hill in the early hours.

Today we were Pergola-building when friends Jackie and Roly popped over – as always Roly was in like a shot to help (THANK YOU) and that enabled me to get the side panels finished off – marvellous.

Note the new light chairs – and on the left our new wooden external shower – yet to be plumbed in properly as I know sod-all about plumbing! Not 100% happy about the blinds but there you go.  We had to move our grapevine and that meant cutting the root which had buried itself into the concrete. Time will tell if we’ve killed the plant which is currently covered in nice-looking grapes. Hmm, that and our Stevia plant… a little genetic engineering…. hmm..

Tonight they had the fair in Galera with lots of stalls and a band playing – not quite the level of excitement of earlier in the week but really fine non-the-less – we were only out for a couple of hours so had to split our time between groups of people we know.

So much better than walking down to the pub in the UK and hoping there is someone, anyone there not wanting to talk about football (though I have to say I really AM missing going out with our friends over there for an Indian – can’t have everything I guess). Anyway, it is after midnight and I keep promising myself a proper night’s sleep.