Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

Yesterday morning we headed off to the Thursday Huescar market. As we passed a bank offering the advert “we speak English” I began to wonder how many of our banks advertise “we speak French” or “we speak Dutch” or whatever. I suspect very few.

We had our usual Thursday morning “Churos” – a strange sausage-shaped fried dough extraction with coffee (some have it with hot chocolate) and spent the morning enjoying the market and the many meats and wide range of fruit on offer. We ended up leaving with some very nice olives which are now, sadly, largely eaten!

In the afternoon I managed to get a little time in the sun.  I also took our Meganne for a spin – it’s first trip up and and down the hills since we got it back – seems absolutely fine – I’ve a little more confidence it will be ok – which is more than one can say for Maureen’s phone – but that’s another story here.

The evening started well with the usual Brits down at the Galera Hotel then on to Pizza Posa – but after a while we saw something we’d almost forgotten about – rain!!! The first significant rain in Galera with a considerable amount of thunder and lightning in the background. Still not in the same league as British rain but wet non-the-less and this brought the temperature down to the 20s where it looks set to stay for a couple of days.

I am determined to get to grips with the Spanish language – much as our largely British friends are great – I’m sure we’re missing something by not also getting involved with the locals. I can must about manage “beer and a hamburger but no lettuce for me” but that and a few other tricks are just about it… must try harder.

If you’ve been following the blog you’ll know that some of the roads around here are not owned by the local authorities and so there’s no chance they’ll fix them – yesterday neighbours Dave, Tom and I made a start on a particularly bad section of the road where the centre had lifted up and was getting to the point of being dangerous for cars with low-profile wheels.

So yesterday we started to do some filling work with stones and sand. Easy enough, but for the heat.

We had great plans to finish off our road repairs with concrete last night until I heard Maureen shout up to the neighbours “are you coming down for a drink?” – that was the end of that.

We did get to test the new LED floodlights – or one of them – very good indeed – but that was about it for productivity for the night. I’ll try all three tonight.

Don’t get me wrong, we had a great night but 8.30am this morning I was dragged out of bed to be told that the boys were over to finish the road-works.

Feeling like death warmed up, I reluctantly got dressed and off we went – 2 hours later despite at least me feeling awful, the previously fractured and frankly dangerous section of the top road is now spot-on along with another minor pothole repair further down the hill – as long as no-one drives over the new cement for a day or so. See photo above – the right side of the road was sunk in with a dangerously raised edge along the middle. 4 bags of cement, lots of sand and stones later… perfect.

Plans to go to the lake today were put on hold so I finishing my emails and spent the morning soaking in the Jacuzzi to collect rays before heading off to the Galera hotel for a very nice Hamburgerisa Completa (hamburger with everything but the kitchen sink).The Jacuzzi is now out of bounds as it’s full of chlorine for a quick clean-up. Time to tackle the usual mountain of work and otherwise-related emails.

A great weekend so far, but not entirely without it’s issues. For the second time in a year, after lots of flawless, smooth driving over the past few weeks, the car has decided to have a fit – the gears and wheels won’t talk to each other and so it’s dead in the water, as it were. The gears and clutch work – but there’s a disconnect between the power train and the actual wheels.

This time, thankfully, it packed in locally (and not on the motorway like last time) so  it is now languishing at the Renault dealer in Huescar and we’re picking up a rental car on Monday – having no car for a week is great for exercise but pretty much a disaster otherwise.

All of this happened on Friday and the guy at the Huescar Renault dealer was very helpful despite our language incompatibility – when I called in armed with my Google translation to find out what the damage was, he had the thing up on the ramp in no time and after prodding with a various metal rods for a while he managed to get one of the wheels to turn for about 2 seconds so I’m hopeful it’s not a new engine or something equally traumatic… but hey, you buy a cheap second hand car, you expect issues. It does make you wonder about the benefits of owning a car and having this hassle as against rental.

After a little rain around Huescar which we missed here in Galera, the weather here has been fabulous – the mist has cleared and there’s a great view of the mountains in the distance. Yesterday, Maureen spent much of her time putting bits and pieces together for our party while I built a music playlist on the computer – that of course and spending as much time as possible in the (cold) hot-tub.

My new lights never did turn up from China but then I was probably being a little optimistic – they’ll probably turn up Monday. We borrowed (with permission) tables and chairs from absent neighbours, ice came from La Posa thanks to incredibly helpful neighbours and we kicked off at 7pm, finishing around 2am – despite having a slightly fuzzy head this morning I’m pretty sure everyone had a good time and thanks to people helping clear up, this morning was not the usual post-party nightmare.

Just as well as it’s quite hot, with clear blue skies again and I foresee a very lazy Sunday ahead of us. The first neighbours up this morning took the garbage away – what more could you ask for…when I’m done here I’m off to soak in the (cold) hot tub and work on the tan.

Tomorrow I’m planning to catch up on emails and work while Maureen and Alison head off to Granada to get a rental car while we figure out what to do with our own slightly disabled Renault.

Regards – Peter Scargill

Went to pick up our friend Alison yesterday at San Javier airport. As we had all day, we decided to have lunch on the beach and a swim – so off we went to a little seaside cafe just North of Los Narejos area which is part of Los Alcazares (straight off the motorway, big roundabout entrance at Los Alcazares, straight down to sea front where the diving centre is). We’d been here previously and had good service but this time the staff were on work-to-rule or so it seemed, it took an hour to get a simple burger. Nice food but zero marks for service.

You can’t swim where the restaurant is but we could see looking South there were people in the water so we headed down a few blocks to Playa Narejos – if you could ignore the smell of fresh sulphur, it looked like a good place to park up and swim so off we went to get some tanning. The sea-front there looks great, there’s a large area which appears levelled off underwater and is all sand – it doesn’t seem to get more than 5ft deep – we noticed some buoys marking off a large area which we assumed was just to keep you off the rocks – well, no, it turns out that they were there to support underwater nets. We figured they were either to contain something nasty or to keep something out.

Turns out it was the latter… as we stood arm-deep in the sea staring at 2 nasty-looking jellyfish in front of us. There was a Spanish lady in the sea with her kids and she was wandering around with a bucket collecting them and throwing them back over to the other side of the net.

We decided after helpfully spotting jellyfish for her for a while, that this wasn’t the best way to relax so off we went to San Javier for some supplies, including some new lights for the cave, before picking up Alison and returning back to Galera mid-evening for a quiet night in. I think overall I prefer the lakes and pools – nothing dangerous and no salt and sand to clean off later.

Alison has brought me a new router from the UK (OpenMesh) so this morning, after catching up with the email mountain, I’m pulling the whole lot apart to see if I can improve reliability a little as the current router has a tendency to die on occasion for no good reason.

Thursday began with a walk down to Galera village to pick up the mail. My order of button cell batteries turned up from China so the colour-change party glasses are now restored to their former glory.

We then spent the remainder of the morning and early afternoon driving cross-country to Fortuna, somewhat North of Murcia to visit our friends Dave and Mary who have a very nice house on the outskirts (somewhat opposite the interestingly-name Bombay Indian Restaurant which didn’t smell at all Indian) and so it was that we spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in their pool before heading off along with a couple of their friends Tony and Mo for dinner.

The Menu Del Noches at restaurant La Puerta Grande (which is just off the main road to Fortuna) at 12 Euros for a 5-course day or evening meal including beer and wine, is not to be sneezed at (closed Mondays)! Very nice indeed and apparently the restaurant is a popular haunt. We met some friendly Dutch folks there and generally had a great time.

After a somewhat excessive amount of alcohol thanks to the all-inclusive pricing and an early start, we returned to a warm (maybe 28c) sunny starlit night and straight back into their pool for a hilarious time where we spent the rest of the night rolling about laughing, while (for reasons that escape me now) competing for who could do the best Essex accents (hence the blog title). Very entertaining, girlfriend!

Friday morning, or more accurately late Friday morning with the temperature in the upper 30s, our hosts prepared a 2pm BBQ – if they felt as bad as I did I have the utmost admiration as I’d have been just as happy to sleep the day away but with some excellent grub consumed I was back in the pool as right as rain. We met some more great neighbours but had to leave mid-afternoon in order to head off to San Javier for a planned airport pick-up and supply refresh.

Maureen and I set off for Murcia and Ikea in the search of various items – we got to Murcia Ikea and found the nearby Chinese store which sadly wasn’t a patch on the one in San Javier and so after a brief check which saw Maureen buying more yard-art, off we went to San Javier -  all of this of course was supposed to be on the way to pick up friend Alison at the airport but as we got nearer to arrival time, it became apparent via a text message that we had the day wrong. Ah, well.

So we ‘re back again on Sunday for a re-try! It’s 9.30am Saturday, Maureen’s still fast asleep – I don’t see a lot happening today… time to catch up with the emails. The photo on the right I could not resist taking – something for sale at Eroski – I wasn’t about to investigate any further with a title like that.

A quiet day yesterday, we’d planned a trip to the lake (holiday, all the shops were shut) but people turned up and we ended up chatting then sitting watching the scum known as “accident insurance companies” on the TV. Meanwhile I’ve been having a play with black plastic pipe coiled up to see how quickly or otherwise it heats up water.  It does – nearly burned myself! I reckon 100ft of black pipe on a simple black corrugated plate would give us all the hot water we need. We have a bath here but generally don’t use it as it’s a little small, so showers are the main reason we have hot water and they don’t use a lot. I reckon feeding the cold water into the tank VIA 100ft or so of coiled pipe as above would preheat so much of the water, we’d really use very little electricity to heat the tank. Simple solution for a simple life!

Meanwhile, after being warned by friends last night while enjoying their company at LA POSA,  that someone over the hill is competing for most-fancy-lit-cave with a set of colour-changers on their wall, last night we took a look over the hill and sure enough. Well, we CAN’T be having THAT, so I’ve ordered a full set of high-power state of the art colour changing LED floods – give it a couple of weeks and you’ll be able to see the place from MOROCCO! I’ve already made a couple of changes but I need outdoor sockets which I’ll get tomorrow.

For now, a nice lazy trip to Fortuna for tonight, then tomorrow we’re off from there to pick up our friend Alison at San Javier (Murcia Airport) and of course fitting in a trip to the Chinese junk store therein.

Another lovely day for it – temperatures in the mid-30s (again).