Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

Well, I think it’s a bank holiday in the UK.. I am counting on “email emergencies” dying off and on that note we’re off to a WIFI-free wilderness. but first… the BBQ… as you can see on the left, Tony the builder did a cracking job on the tiles and this morning I got up first thing (which in itself is an achievement considering how much wine we polished off down at Pizza La Posa last night with our neighbours) and got the paint pot out as the plaster isn’t QUITE white. Half an hour later the result is as you see on the left – lovely.

Just time to clean up, make sure the camera and phone are charged and we’re off, via Lanjaron, to Capiliera which at something like 4,500ft above sea level is a lot higher than we are – and the mountains above it are still snow-capped. The trip is well timed because the forecast indicates another 40 degrees – with luck we’ll be spending the day and evening with a nice cool breeze to offset the heat – I can’t wait. For now this blog will give you some information about Capaliera but I hope to bring back lots of decent photos. Tomorrow morning the plan is to head from there to the market in Guadix then back up here.

Right, it’s 9am, quick shower and we’re ready to go… here are some more photos from yesterday… the first on the right shows Maureen checking out one of the many partly completed buildings in the area around Embalse Del Negratin. I’m guessing that just before the recession they were in a massive building phase putting together houses near the waterside –and then it all just stopped as some of these places have been here for a couple of years now without change.

Quite a contrast to the new house on the left below which, well, if someone offered me this I’d snap it up – some of the house designs you see out here are absolutely wonderful. This particular one was in Friela which is near Negratin and though again parts of it are a building site, other parts are absolutely stunning – and not old stunning – new stunning. Comparing these to some of the new imagination-less crap they’re putting out back home in the UK … well, there is no comparison.

When we go somewhere we tend to take diversions just to get a feel for the place and Friela is well worth a quick drive around more to see it’s potential than where it is now – which is like everywhere else, at a grinding halt in a recession but when things recover – and given the proximity to the lake, this place has lots of potential (it’s also only a stone’s throw off one of Spain’s excellent motorways.

What grabs you in some of these towns is the sheer diversity of construction – even the row housing has an artistic look to it. More later.

A new record for our trip I think, the temperature today (Thursday) peaked 41 degrees – yes, that’s marginally hotter than you’d keep your hot water tank!

We got up this morning and Tony the builder turned up sharp-ish to sort my plant watering system and to tile the BBQ – you HAVE to see the BBQ (next blog) – he’s done a cracking job. Next stop we went to Huescar not for the market but to pop into the cafe in the square for coffee and “churos” which are basically made from fried dough.. you get a plate full of these curved dough sticks, pour sugar over them and dip them in hot chocolate if you have it, coffee if you don’t. Lovely.

So, in the process of doing that, we discovered a new hardware store with an amazing Fablon-type material for putting on the windows – electrostatically, that turns any window into a mock-stained-glass window.. but really, Fablon was a bad example – this stuff actually looks great. More later when it’s up and we get photos.

When we got to Huescar we were blown away by a guy’s parked HUMMER.. the photos say it all – one of the best movies of all time perfectly captured on a vehicle. Bear in mind that Arnold was the star of the movie and in real life drives a Hummer – and that this was his BEST movie ever and not to mention that the female co-star was Kristanna Loken who is – well, check out the link over her name, she’s not by any means the best looking female in the world but she has to rate as one of the sexiest… check this out – and if you think it’s boring – I can’t help you – Loken as the Terminatrix in Rise of the Machines, defeated by superconducting magnets – marvelous.

So.. .that was the START of our day, we then went off to lake Negratin just up from BAZA and once again we were not disappointed – the water is just superb… once you’re in there is a constant flux between cool or cold water – and these waves of almost HOT water, it’s difficult to describe but suffice it to say that just sitting there at 40+C up to your neck in the most beautifully blue water with an almost constant, light breeze going by – is, well, I could just stay there facing the sun all day… in reality we spent a couple of hours and then cleared off to visit nearby villages before returning to our cave for a while and then heading off to the village – the PLAN was to have a half at one of the local pubs, then clear off to Huescar – but as happens we met our pals Richard and Christine at one of the bars and that was it for the night – Richard is from Scotland with a business background and so personally being an almost-Scot (well, Wark isn’t THAT far away from Scotland) we have lots in common and after a couple of bottles of wine we solved most of the world’s problems.

At this point I’m going to give up and simply show you some photos I took today, none of which even REMOTELY capture the superb atmosphere down at the lake – you just have to be here… but I hope my photographic efforts at least give you a flavour…  tomorrow we’re off FIRST THING down south to what I hope will be my best Kodak moments to date… which I’ve already promised to share on the blog (and to those of you who’ve recently been kind enough to let me know you read this – THANKS – really – it’s great to know that someone appreciates my efforts.

Could this be a burns victim? Or perhaps a side of beef with a disease? No… it’s my right LEG after the insects have been digging into me… I’ve not a clue how they do it but I go to bed without a blotch and wake up in the morning looking like a serious accident victim… until a couple of years ago this NEVER happened to me but now the flies well and truly have it in for me. Some day I’ll remember to use the anti-bite spray…. or wear a haz-mat suit.

I should stress that while this photo shows only the LEAST severe of the bites I have.. none of them give me any trouble at all – it’s all visual… but if I was single, my chances of scoring would be ZILCH. Anyway as far as the water is concerned I have LOADS of new photos but I don’t have time until the weekend to put them up – the photos below however pretty much say it all – yes that greeny-blue really is the colour of the water…. and with fish… more later – enjoy the pics…

Well, not exactly wasted but most of our plans went out of the window.

It was probably around 38 degrees today – again… the insects are on top form and I woke up in the morning with my legs looking like they’d done a few rounds in Afghanistan… absolutely pebble-dashed with attacks. I can’t say they hurt but they look worrying, made worse by the stuff I have for them which turns white when it dries – no street-cred AT ALL. The thing is – we have mesh on all the windows. The buggers must crawl in at floor level…. today’s bedroom spray will hopefully put pay to any remaining nasties.

The external socket is now up and running – and my network wiring is now tidily fastened to the outside of the house instead of the inside!! Internal switching to control the rope-light is up and running (the plan next trip is to use more efficient LED rope-lighting and also light up the side of the steps so I figured I may as well get the mains part of it finished as there is no way I’m buying LED rope light here). I can do simple control via the cameras (which have on-off control systems) but the idea of asking the local hardware store for a relay is just beyond my imaginative capabilities so that’ll wait until October.

We never made it to the lake, I took most of the morning to get my jobs done – along with another round of “absolutely urgent” Federation emails to handle – I’m doing this VERY differently next year, the organisation will manage if I die so they can manage if I’m on holiday…  and so we spent part of the afternoon chatting to our neighbour and the rest in the jacussi playing “catch the wasp”. I’ve done a spot of painting this evening – the cheap paint we bought in BAZA is just that, cheap – helped immensely by a shovel of plaster (in the early days of business, my business partner Aidan and I moved into a place with absolutely atrocious walls and we were broke – so we got some cheap paint, mixed it with plaster and simultaneously covered all the cracks and painted the walls at the same time… I’ve not forgotten that trick). The house in the photo? Oh, that’s just something we passed on the way home yesterday… we decided to take the country route just outside of BAZA and BOY did we find out how the other half live…  some lovely properties, no more than 3 or 4 of them in a kilometre drive WAY up in the hills… someone has money.

Tomorrow morning, Tony our builder is coming over to tile the BBQ and hopefully put my drip feed timer inside the lean-to (to protect it in the winter). Maureen and I are planning a trip to the market and perhaps the lake thereafter and Friday (I’m getting quite excited) we’re off down south to stay at a (hopefully) lovely hotel at something like 5000 ft above sea level – I’m hoping to get to the top of the mountain armed with camera as it’s above the lowest cloud level and with SNOW on the top – Kodak moments are just waiting for me!!!

Start of our last full week – this morning Richard and I went off to get some mortar to fix the road but due to the temperature (maybe 33 degrees this morning) we decided to give the actual repairs a miss… that gave me time to catch up on emails and get a little work done while Maureen caught up on her schoolwork.

For the afternoon Maureen and I went off to the public pool in Huescar. It’s 5 minutes out of Huescar and very clean and modern (we’ll ignore the total lack of soap in the washrooms)… and at lunchtimes it is virtually empty – that’s definitely the best time to go. Towards 4pm or so it starts filling up with unruly Spanish kids who really don’t understand the concept of personal space… so time to leave. We then went off in search of drills and for once the Chinese junk store came up trumps – £2.50 for a set of three LONG masonry drills that actually work. Now, the fact that I drilled the hole in the wrong place isn’t their fault!

In the evening we stayed in, temporary neighbours upstairs don’t seem bothered about socialising – which is fine… I got on helping my colleagues back in the UK with some corporate reporting while Maureen watched what I call “women’s TV” – the movie channel (real movies, or something) that’s all about relationships and poor acting – as against killing things and really good looking stars – which of course – I prefer 🙂

The plan for tomorrow is to pick up some cable to make an external socket for the rope-light, fit in a trip to the bank, organise a permanent re-positioning of the WIFI access point and to get a little cementing done before retiring, once again to our favourite lake just beyond Baza for some more vitamin A and just MAYBE a Magra Con Tomate.  I have to take the opportunity while it’s there, from all reports the weather in the UK is atrocious – while with a couple of exceptions (and I mean a couple) it’s been 33-39 degrees every afternoon – and for anyone who thinks that’s hot – you quickly get used to it – and it’s INFINITELY preferable to freezing to death.

After taking it easy yesterday, mainly due to having no concrete to finish off the road repair that neighbour Richard and I started the day before, Maureen and I spent the evening at home with new friends Angela and Dennis, sitting under the pergola enjoying some tapas and Maureen’s latest trick: elongated burgers to fit in the finger buns normally reserved for hot dogs – good idea! I think we lasted out till somewhat after midnight, not because of the air cooling off but probably more to do with alcohol I should guess.

None of which stopped me getting up at 6am this morning and installing a brand new module into my new “hobby” the next set of online forums for the FSB…  I’m learning about this system at a great rate of knots – which is handy as the minute I get back to the UK I’ve promised a PowerPoint on the subject.  I think I lasted a couple of hours before retiring until 11am at which point we’d promised our friends we’d go see their cave and drop off their laptop which I’d been updating. That was great – every cave in the area is unique and so it’s always nice to see what others have done. Next stop we popped into see “Galera Phil” and his wife to see their cave, also for the first time, collecting even more ideas on the way.

After a brief stop-off back at our place we headed off to Cullar. There’s a church up in the hills – you can see it as you’re coming into Cullar from the Huescar end… and for some time I’ve been promising myself to go take a look. After a couple of false starts we found the (patently obvious) entrance to the long and windy path up the hill to the church – with a sign “torreon arabe”, a quite magnificent affair with an equally magnificent view of (the rather lacklustre) Cullar. The very welcome breeze at the top of the hill made up for the 39 degrees C summer heat.

Culture out of the way we popped into Cullar for a coffee and a little relaxation before heading off back to Galera, but not before a trip to “Restaurante Montecarlo” in Cullar for a late Sunday lunch (4pm) comprising lasagne as a starter and Magra con Tomate which I have to say was superb. The restaurant is very popular and quite reasonably priced, I think we spend 32 euros between the two of us and that’s only because Maureen ordered a steak!!!

Before the sun set we headed off home and I had a quick dip in the (rather cool) Jacuzzi which gave me enough energy to write this blog… but it’s fading fast – I can see a very lazy evening coming along.

If only every day could be as nice… tomorrow – I’ve promised Richard we’ll do a spot of concreting!

GREAT start to the day… my Spanish credit card ran out a couple of months ago due to them giving shorter timeouts than UK cards (and being in the UK I was not using it). So last week we went off to the bank to get things organised – meanwhile another bank in BAZA ate Maureen’s card, no doubt due to our bank not understanding our simple request for another card for me… anyway… it was all meant to be sorted out by Tuesday…

Yesterday the plan was to go to Granada after popping into the bank for 2 replacement cards… WELL, our  trip out was slightly put back by the local bank NOT having our credit cards as promised – and just to round it off, as we returned from the bank in Galera to our parked car, a young truck driver smashed our parked car!!! Nice! Notice the utterly ruined mirror! I took millions of photos leading to the inexorable conclusion that our car was innocently parked, minding it’s own business when the truck driver smashed into it… all reported etc… lets see how that works with the insurance company – last time we ended up paying out for months before getting our money back (at that time a truck jack-knifed and ended up with us briefly doing 60mph backwards on the motorway, writing off the car).

If at first you don’t succeed.. it’s a good job I’m mechanically minded, the utterly SMASHED electric mirror was within half an hour road-legal and pretty from a distance if somewhat inclined to pointing into thin air.. but it worked.

So that was our starter for the day… 1.25 hours later we were in Granada to pick up my required NETWORKING cable (see earlier blog on “broadband woes”).  According to the weather forecast it was going to pour with rain for the day and so we didn’t take any swimming gear or stand-by overnight bag etc.

We arrived in Granada and headed off straight to junction 123 to my favourite commercial area and the MediaMarkt store to get the networking cable. By the time we got done there it was mid-day, sunny and 33 degrees C – so much for the weather forecast – we decided we really must make something of the day other than shopping and Maureen reminded me that we’d decided to go take a look at a nearby town in the hills that she’d seen on the web.

And so off we went. Within 20 minutes of suffering the very weirdly setup-up Android Sat-Nav and ending up back in the middle of Granada in a series of ever-diminishing circles, we switched to my iPhone Tomtom and off we went. The nearby village turned out to be 1.5 hours south of Granada but never mind as we had the most FANTASTIC day ending up in a marvellous area and loving every minute of it.

First stop was a little town called Lanjaron, around 50km from Granada and positioned in the western Las Alpujarras. Apparently (we didn’t know this) it is generally considered the gateway to the region. We stopped for lunch at the “Meson El Salado” and 27 Euros later came away quite satisfied if slightly startled at the cost.

Ignore for now the fact that the back of Maureen’s head is missing – such is the nature of sequential-image swept panoramas – but I’m using them more and more because sometimes they really are the only way to convey the atmosphere that normal photos just don’t capture.

As we wandered back to the car, Maureen spotted the building below which needs some work… but imagine this fully restored… up in the mountains…

We continued our journey and on the way spotted what looked like larger than normal windmills way up in the mountains…

I have to say that photos UTTERLY fail to put this across… from the road these just look like BIG windmills – but there’s a loose-stone road going to every one of them and so we drove down to the first one we came to as you can see – the guy in the blue shirt is me. The first thing you notice is the sound of POWER.. the massive turbine blades which almost defy belief, constantly, slowly turning and with the most eyrie whooshing noise… standing next to the units is awe-inspiring and makes you wonder how on EARTH people install these monsters at sea.  I can see why people so powerfully defend them as they’re really a thing of beauty (sadly not a great deal of use when it’s not windy) and a testament to 21st century human engineering achievement. If you feel I’m talking bollocks I can only suggest finding one of the larger units and seeing for yourself as close as I was – utterly amazing. What’s also really nice is the utter absence of wires – which are all underground. 

We continued our journey, ending up in the village of Capileira, recorded as 1436 metres from sea level and the most northerly of the three villages in the gorge of the Poqueira river in the Las Alpujaras district of the province of Granada. You can look this up in Wikipedia but to be honest their description ia very clinical and just fails to get across the sheer magic of the area.

Suffice it to say, we’re going back as soon as possible – we’ll include an overnight stay and the camera will be at the ready to try and capture what for me competes well with anything I’ve seen in the VAR region of France and absolutely beats Britain’s lake district hands down.

On the way home later in the evening, the heavens opened up North of Granada we saw some of the most beautiful rainbows in living memory – the photo below kind of gets the idea across but doesn’t really capture the colours – note that in this panorama you can see there’s a complete arc – what you may JUST see is the secondary ring further out – which was quite clear to onlookers. This rainbow lasted a good part of the 2.5 hour journey back home until finally the sun set in the hills and the rainbow was no more!