Bedrock

Not a great start to the morning, as I was minding my own business on one of our rocking chairs I got the urge to stretch and for reasons still not clear that took the chair beyond it’s range of movement. I don’t know how I managed it but I got my hands around my head just before it went crashing down onto the very hard bathroom floor tiles, the result being a very loud cracking noise and a very sore head.

Still, that didn’t stop us getting down, via a very poor excuse for a road, to the waterside – to give it the proper title “Embalse De San Clemente” to spend the day with friends and sandwiches – I have to say not a bad way to spend a Sunday. San Clemente is at quite a low level now – but one of the advantages of that is hitherto unavailable beach areas! I can only assume that this is the reason we had for most of the day, the whole place to ourselves… maybe that and a rather forbidding road sign.

We set up shop on the “beach” complete with umbrellas and deck chairs and we had a great time fighting with the umbrellas thanks to a particularly enthusiastic gale – but at 30c+ that actually came as a bonus.

Click on the photos to expand them – originals are quite big. San Clemente is a stone’s throw away from Huescar and a pleasant enough drive apart from the last bit… did you ever see the Mars Rover videos?

So that’s how we spent our day – me nursing a bad head but otherwise everyone relaxing. I took loads of pics and will put them up on Flickr but here are some samples. What is really nice about this area is the lack of steep slope once you get in the water (and relative lack of sharp stones). The weather is changing as you can see in the photos – we started the day cloudless and now the clouds are winning though it is still very warm – I don’t suppose a downpour would do any harm and the lakes would certainly benefit.  Tonight we’re planning to pop down to the medieval market in Galera for a while.

Friday: One of those afternoons with nothing concrete in mind so we headed off around the back of Huescar to check out Embalse de San Clemente. Turns out that while the way we went was good for taking pictures, short of putting the car across a 3” drop in the road, it was not the best way to get any swimming done – so we ended up spending the afternoon driving around and stopping into Asador La Parra – which I can’t find on Google maps but which is on the way to San Clemente and pretty hard to miss. NICE cup of coffee.

That was the highlight of the afternoon – apart from the pleasant drive. We came back and I made the mistake of deciding to upgrade Maureen’s computer to Windows 10 – that was just before we had 10 power cuts in a row (Thanks, Endessa). The only good thing about the rubbish electricity here in Spain is that it is focussing my attention on getting my various gadgets to handle power cuts gracefully. Got up this morning and thankfully managed to revert her computer back to the previous version and start again. Time will tell.  Meanwhile, here are some photos.

Today has been a good day – weather stunning. Mid-morning Maureen and I headed off with friends over to a river near Pozo Alcon, stopping along the way at the river itself, for lunch and to the nearby Embalse De La Bolera for a quick swim. Words fail me really – excellent day so instead I’ll leave you with some photos of the trip. Don’t forget to click on the photos for larger versions. Or head off over to Flickr for the high res originals and some more photos! https://www.flickr.com/photos/scargill/albums/72157656795573120

Another night of activity in the town – last night some of the guys stayed up all night (I didn’t – still jet-lagged) and so tonight Maureen and I stayed in and sat by the Pergola.  I managed to stop up until midnight when the fireworks went off – and very nice, too.

I won’t say it hasn’t been a struggle but as of today I’ve just about cracked the TV thing with one exception.

If you’re not a frequent visitor to Spain you may not know that SKY and the BBC do not like you watching their stuff when you are abroad – this is indeed being fought as I understand by the EU as it is highly uncompetitive – and as someone who pays the TV licence and pays for a Sky subscription – I find the restrictions utterly unacceptable.

Right now the only thing I have not cracked is Sky on demand (well, sort of) – so if you have a SKY HD box they’re not about to let you record on-demand stuff as you did in the UK – I’m still working on that.

VPNs are a way around most of the issues – but you need a fast VPN to the UK and this tends to slow down access to other stuff – so I’m using a service recommended by a neighbour of ours called Unblock-Us. In UK terms it’s around £3 a month – and so the way it works is you make a minor update to your router (DNS settings) and those services that need it – iPlayer and Sky – go through that and are handled as if you were in the UK – other services go un-affected. No setup on individual PCs etc.

Also I have a Now-TV box here and that too works thanks to Unblock-Us. The good part about that is that it is relatively easy to unlock that box into what it really is – a Roku media server – so with the addition of PLEX on my PC and on the Now TV box not only can we access our media here – but also on the phone anywhere – remembering that THREE now include data with roaming accounts – such as Spain and the USA. Now I have PLEX operating – I’m looking to see what other goodies the Roku system has to offer.

Sky Go also works using this system and so with a decent tablet, SKY options are now much wider. I’d still like to crack getting the Sky broadband downloading working – it’s likely on a Port that the American company doing Unblock-US are unaware of. 

So all in all a step change from where we were weeks ago. All we need now is a decent TV a

We’ve been here now for a couple of weeks and regular readers may well be wondering why there’s been nothing in here. I referred in my last blog to issues with UPS.. well, that turned into a nightmare, meanwhile my ability to add images to any of my blogs suddenly disappeared.

The UPS affair can only be described as a disaster. They really DO NOT like finishing the job off here and actually delivering to people’s homes – made worse by Google maps which actually points to the wrong place when you try to get to our place (update August 2016 – that has since long been fixed). Many, many emails later, I got my delivery and I got it to my home. However.. the supplier put the wrong amount on the goods, leading UPS to charge too much for the VAT and DUTY on that (despite the inescapable fact that throughout Europe, deliveries of low-value goods from China almost always escape VAT and DUTY when sent through the postal system.  UPS in addition have a range of extras they can charge – handling charges etc. and the long and short of it is – I would recommend STRONGLY against using that company for any kind of overseas purchase.

Meanwhile a supplier in Sweden was shipping some parts to me to take to Boston with me on my forthcoming trip this weekend. He ordered 3 day delivery and…. they let him down – not only that but when he tried to follow this up after they claimed they’d tried to deliver the goods (they had not) the Spanish end of their operation stopped answering phone calls or responding to emails. So all in all not too good on the postal front but at least I proved they’ll deliver to the door.   My normal mail via our friendly postman has been going without a hitch.

And so to the blog – for reasons that foxed me and eventually foxed the service provider, I could not longer send images to any of my blogs. This has been going on for 2 weeks now and only today has it been resolved. I guess in compensation for the time it has taken, they’ve built a managed VPS (virtual Private Server) for me and all my stuff is now in there and up to now, running like a rocket! So up to now we’ve had a good time, done a bit of work on the house, been to the lake, down to Mojacar, Velez Rubio and other places with friend who’ve sadly now gone back to the UK for a while – and we’ve replaced the battery on the car, which it turns out was way over a decade old!!

The weather here has been excellent, rarely dropping below the mid-thirties in the afternoon. Next week I’m off to Boston where it is only marginally cooler, to participate in the Boston FABFEST – if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you’ll see what I get up to there.  Expect lots of pictures of tech stuff.