Freezing in Galera

Snowing in Spain – the bit they don’t tell you in the brochures: WELL – this wasn’t quite all we’d hoped for – after a lovely Boxing Day in which we got off the plane at Malaga to brilliant sunshine and had lunch in the sun (in the same mall as my favourite shop – Carrefour), we arrived 3 hours later in Galera to find that they’ve clearly had a bad winter! Bits of snow are still lying around and some of my lovely white external paintwork had just simply dropped off (easy to fix) and the cold water was stone, cold dead. Worse, we got into the house, turned every electrical heater on we could find and BANG – off went the electricity, not just ours – but the supply for the area. Turns out that our cheapo Spanish builders still haven’t put a proper supply in!!
Thankfully the electrical fellow came out and pressed a button somewhere and so our first night was spent hovering in front of a not inconsiderable wood fire. At least this time we remembered the Sky card. Oh and we now have a bath.
On the remote webcam front, it turns out the misfunctional webcam was my fault, in the summer I put in a relay for the WIFI, sending the signal up the mains to a router upstairs. I turns that off when we left I turned off the mains relay but left the router on – giving the computer downstairs a choice of 2 similar routers, one of which had no Internet supply. It’s a miracle it lasted as long as it did!
Saturday morning we got off to an early start, getting the fire going again. It’s now 10am and the living room is just starting to warm up. Turns out the water wasn’t really broken – just the plumber being over-cautious when fitting the bath so we went around and turned everything off. All up and running and electricity permitting we should soon have hot water, to boot.
Our new sign: I’ve just been up on the steps fitting the new “Bedrock” slate sign kindly donated by friends Bob and Margaret. Weather outside is, well, better than the Northeast of Britain but only just. There’s a vague hint of sunshine and its 7 degrees out there. Forcast is not good but then they are invariably wrong. Maureen is upstairs on a vacuum frenzy.
Power’s gone off again!