Bedrock

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I have to tell you I cannot WAIT to get out of wet and cold England… We’ve another couple of weeks to go before the first trip to Spain of the summer. It’s 27 degrees C out there already meanwhile back here in the miserable Northeast the sun can’t manage to stay out for more than 5 minutes at a time!! 

The plan for the summer is a week in May with one of our friends and then back to the UK for a while followed by a 5-week summer in Spain. All I need is suntan oil and I’m ready to go. I think most of the summer trip we’ll be on our own but that’s ok as we’re making friends over there already. Hopefully by the time we get to Galera the builders will have fixed a few issues and after a spot of touch-up painting we can enjoy a nice break.

Rounding off a very different holiday to what I’d expected:  Bob’s now home in the UK and by all accounts is on the mend. Weather here in the UK is up to now marginally better than it was in Spain (with a couple of exceptions) – and I’m now just about caught up. Back in May, hopefully by then the weather over there will be nearer to what Brits expect from Spain (though the weather in Murcia last weekend was superb).

That’s it… till the next time…

As this first leg of Summer 2009 in Spain draws to a close, I plan to come back in May sometime with Maureen to catch up on all the jobs I blew this time. Bob is still in the hospital in Baza, they put a new plaster on his leg and so I reckon it’s going to be another day or so before they let him out. Meanwhile his wife, daughter and grandson are over here, stopping at the cave for a while, to look after him after I leave. Bad luck that there were 2 religious holidays followed by a weekend and so there have been no doctors around.  They’re planning on coming back to the UK with him on Tuesday, personally I think that’s over-optimistic – I think the doctor may say “no flying” until the plaster is off, which means going home in a people-mover and boat – but only time will tell.

I took the opportunity to visit LORCA or thereabouts – a rather large city part way  between Galera and Murcia airport. One of the benefits of carrying a sat-nav is that you don’t have to worry about getting lost – so I took a diversion off the motorway and found myself in an industrial estate behind which appeared to be a rather large solar farm…. just how large wasn’t apparent until I found myself wandering along a dirt road that would be well placed in a desert somewhere.

The “farm” turned out to be the largest collection of solar arrays I’ve ever see and after ditching the car in favour of an on-foot reconnoitre I have to say…. MOST impressed – the Spanish really DO take solar power seriously – this is a VAST collection of massive solar panels – if you look in the photo, the panels go almost as far as you can see. I can’t begin to imagine the cost or power output of this lot but I’m sure anyone sufficiently interested can Google Lorca and get some more information – suffice it to say it’s well worth 5 minutes out of your journey to take a look. 

A mere few minutes from Murcia airport is a delightful holiday area, not at all what you might expect (Brit-town full of chip-shops) but a nice little beach area, modern town with all the amenities.  Certainly nice for a short visit.

Latest info – they’ve stuck a plaster on Bob’s leg and so that kills any notion of him flying back in the near future. Family are flying over tonight and I expect them to get here around midnight. He’s in hospital for another day at least and I’m off shortly to drop some stuff off for him. It’s 18 degrees outside and the sun is blasting down – more suntan cream I reckon. Les from Spanish Inland has been over and I’ve shown him the state of the roof (couple of broken tiles) so he can get that fixed while I’m away. Neighbours next door has a mishap as a bit of their wall dropped off and in the gales earlier in the year, one neighbour not only lost the top of their pergola – but the legs as well!!!  I can’t see mine doing that, the legs are buried in concrete.

Interesting – having left the SKY card back in the UK and with Bob still in the hospital I was reduced to watching Aljazeera last night… (well anything rather than the BBC) and they were discussing getting around the censorship that the likes of the Chinese put on Internet use – I was just starting to get impressed by the details that Aljazeera were making available when I realised that of course the Chinese would have already banned the program – as would all the other repressive regimes we call “allies”.

Just across the valley there is a mountain…. which always has some kind of snow on it – thought you might like to compare images taken on two successive days… yesterday and today. Quite a difference, huh!  It’s been another warm day though not as hot as it was at the start of the week (which is nice as it gives my head burns time to heal 🙂 )

This evening the temperature sat at around 15 degrees or  so until the sun went down. If this trend keeps going it might be warm enough to sit outside in the dark and do a bit of star-gazing.  The cheap bottle of wine worked – “Conde Noble” – I would not recommend using it to impress the girlfriend and thinking about it I’m sure that’s why I got a leg cramp last night – so maybe it didn’t work after all.

A simple enough idea, Maureen was off to Chicago while Bob and I came over here to sunny Spain. Of course, the best laid plans always screw up and so on Saturday we all went off to the airport and Bob and I went off to customs leaving Maureen to sort her flight to the USA, fully expecting her to follow us shortly thereafter.

Except, no. Next thing we had a call on the mobile to say that Expedia had screwed up her flight from Newcastle to London, the first stage of the trip to Chicago. As it turns out they managed to fit her on a revised set of flights on Sunday – I’ve not yet asked but I suspect it was a very LONG flight.

Meanwhile Bob and I had a pleasant flight over to Murcia and arrived pretty much on time to very nice sunshine with peaks of 25 degrees C – nice. Off we went to find my favourite supermarket only to discover that my brand new Orange phone has a tendency to crash. To put this in perspective this is the 4th of the same model I’ve had from Orange due to a sound issue… the sound works great this time, it just dies every now and then – NOT what you want when navigating (using Tom-tom on the phone) through a foreign country.

Anyway, we found a smashing shopping centre just outside Malaga by accident and off we went to buy the week’s groceries.

We arrived in Galera in the early hours of Sunday morning, had a couple of beers and that was that, apart from Bob locking himself in the bathroom thanks to a dodgy Spanish lock. The good news is the Jacuzzi works a treat and with a little effort Bob managed to fix the lock after extricating himself with a handy kitchen knife.

Sunday the sun was out – but it didn’t really LOOK like a hot day so we set about repairing the Pergola. We spent much of the day outside examining cracked roof tiles and planning out the repairs only to come in at teatime looking like a pair of tomatoes. We could not believe that a half-serious sun could do so much in so little time and this morning I’m suffering as the skin on my head shrinks! Factor 80 I think from now on. To make matters worse just as the skin on my head was shrinking I scraped the lot on a lower-than-usual bathroom doorframe and so now I look like I’ve been through a war and hurting accordingly.

Low-current electronic lamps are supposed to last for 2 years – but, it looks like the Chinese weren’t told that because my mate Les over here reckons 1-in-10 over here will fail out of the box… the ones we bought over here are certainly not even living up to their already bad reputation. This morning, accordingly we went off shopping for replacement roofing materials for the Pergola and 4 replacement electronic lamps. The former cost an arm and a leg at the thieving BAZA hardware store and as for the lamps – erm, no – I’ll bring them over from the UK – would you believe up to 15 EUROS for one lamp!!!

That’s the EASY part of the day. We got some DIY done around lunchtime and about half way through Bob had a mishap with the stairs. That’s an understatement, he tripped up on the stairs an broke his right leg – as I want readers to keep reading I’ll skip the details.

So now we’re in a foreign country, bereft of the ability to speak the language, with a bust leg. At this point I’d like to sing the praises of Les at Spanish Inland Properties who came out – helped me get Bob into his people-mover and off we went to the local hospital in BAZA (as good as anything I’ve seen in the UK up to now). Latest news is that they have put pins in Bob’s leg and want him to stay here for a while.

Meanwhile – we’ve had some pretty amazing winds which put pay to the roofing on the Pergola and the builder is coming in this weekend hopefully to make a new start on that. Despite excellent weather generally it remains cool in the cave, rather cooler than I’d like and I’ve ordered a load of wood for the fire which should be here tonight.

The broadband meantime is working a treat and so no problems in that direction – that also means I’m getting a regular flood of emails from the UK to keep me busy.

As our short stay comes to an end, we’re busy discussing the best way to heat the place for the next time we come over in winter. Outside temperatures these past few days have varied from freezing overnight to 16 degrees or more on sunny days at lunchtime. Without the sun we’ve seen mid-day temperatures as low as a few degrees. We have a wood fire and electric heat, but neither are really up to the job, taking days to heat the place up. 

After a short trip to Huescar where they were revving up for their “Mardi Gras”,  last night we took our first trip to Bistro 23 and La Casa Grande in El Margen, a delightful restaurant run by Brits Simon and Jan. In the process they showed us their solution to heat: ceramic panels called Econoheat. These 425w panels take 4 simple mounting holes and are easy to use – even safe to fit in bathrooms etc. So currently we’re looking to using these to supplement the wood fire for those colder days.

And so on our final day, the sun is shining, the jacuzzi is working and the laptop fan is on it’s last legs…  off for a soak, I think.