Bedrock

We now have less than 24 hours to go and we start our long trip to Spain.

Very roughly the image describes our planned route – from the Northeast, stopping over at a friend’s place, 24 hour ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, then a couple of hours drive before another stopover before heading down to Galera.

Quite a trip armed with three cats and a car-full of “stuff”. But we’ve done it before so it’s not entirely new. With rain and 13c max temperatures forecast for Hexham area for the coming week now is a great time to clear off.  Galera on the other hand is forecast to have a constant 26c max for the coming week – that will do us just fine – great weather for fixing hosepipes and upgrading the solar panel.

Had a great winter here in the UK thanks to our friends – without which it would have been pretty miserable (the weather in the Northeast is always miserable) – looking forward to getting together with our friends in Spain for a great summer.

Lots to do, people to see, places to go. By the time we leave I’ll have had my share of Indian food to make up for the coming lack of it!!

I can’t believe we’ve been here a week already – time flies.

Once we got settled into the cave and had time to start looking for things to fix, we discovered more minor issues, there’s been a little vandalism down at the roundabout – someone cut the solar panels clean. You have to wonder about people (especially as there’s an on/off switch). Anyway, that’s all repaired and the shower which had been deliberately disconnected will soon have a new copper connector – might just put a cattle fence generator on the metalwork in future. So all’s well there.

The Pergola had an unrelated electrical issue – a dry solder joint (I can only imagine the extreme cold in the evenings) but I fixed that yesterday. There is always something to keep me busy.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on my tech blog, I’m on a voyage of discovery right now, in-depth learning about something very technical (modern Javascript Objects) and we’ve spend some quality time with our neighbours/friends and had a great night out last night at Emilios Bar (Calle Los Carriones, Castillejar). I noted there’s a photo club of sorts up there but as they meet on the first Monday of the month (8pm) I’ve had that until May.

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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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It will soon be time for our trip back to the cold, wet, political desert known (just) as the United Kingdom just as the pound equals the Euro on its way into oblivion. I have some great friends there who do I do miss when we’re not with them – but returning to Brexit Britain is not something I am AT ALL looking forward to.

However, for now that’s just something we have to do. It won’t be long before I find an excuse to come back here and of course we’ll be back full swing in April anyway so an intermediate trip is mainly down to finding decent flights and avoiding the worst of the Andalucían winter so probably that’s February out if previous years are anything to go by.

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We’ve had a very busy start this Autumn, with friends Chris and Jinette over for a visit. They arrived late last week and we took them down to the coast – to Nerja – enjoying the views of the viaducts and general scenery on the way down.

After a couple of great evenings with Chris, Jinette and our neighbours John and Julie, we headed back up the coast to drop them off at Alicante airport and took the opportunity to drop into Benidorm before heading home.

Here are some pictures we took along the way….

In the photo above you see an an amazing 60+ story building which apparently has never actually been occupied. A monument to great design and crap planning, what a view you’d have out of those windows at the top!

Benidorm seems a strange mix of really BAD buildings some of which are falling apart – and nice modern ones. There is certainly a buzz about the place and the seaside area is very pleasant – sadly the Brits who like to pretend they are on holiday in a hot Britain have brought things down to a low level in some parts with £2.50 fry-up breakfasts. Any unique Spanish character has been buried under this attempt to appease to the lowest level.

Interesting to compare the above with the absolutely marvellous Nerja…

However, we had a great time throughout and hope to repeat the experience in the future.