Bedrock

After a particularly drab start to April with rain, more rain and the worst of the Sahara desert falling on us, things are finally looking up… the last couple of days have been just fine and today it got as high as 24c.

Despite frantic tech blog writing since Christmas, it seems I’ve somewhat ignored this blog, our window on life in Galera and thereabouts. This was brought to my attention by a nice couple we met in Galera’s La Posa Pizzeria (Jamie and Lindsay – I hope I spelled that right – if not, let me know, guys) who it seems know all about me due to this blog…. so here’s something hopefully of interest.

Maureen and I have been travelling back and forth to the UK since November and soon after our return to Galera (late February) we discovered our attempts to sell up in the UK were bearing fruit – so once again we headed back to the UK (this time by plane, so much more civilised than driving much of the length of England, spending a full day on the boat then driving much of the length of Spain) to start a clean-out operation over there (so much for retiring) and I came back on April 7, just in time for a local dental appointment (Mrs Sanchez in nearby Huescar) with Maureen returning to Spain a week later.

Neither of us have been out much in the village, so much to do but now with the prospect of several uninterrupted months here in Spain (rather handy for making postal delivery arrangements for my tech blog) I’m beginning to focus – just a slight matter of de-oranging the cavehome after the storms.

Coming up to date, yesterday was an important religious ceremony in Galera (all 15 minutes of action before we headed off the bar) and fortunately the weather held up so I could capture the essence of it on video (see below). I hope someone likes it. If so, view it in YouTube for best effect – and in case the embed doesn’t work – here’s a link to the video). Note: in the video I refer to clan – YouTube videos are a pain to edit – I meant Klan.

Today (Saturday April 16), a trip to Caravaca De La Cruz (somewhat over an hour east of Galera, a town we’ve previously pretty much ignored on the way to the coast, usually during trips to Alicante airport).

The PLAN was to go looking for plants at the garden centre on the RM714 near Valentin, as an alternative to our normally-preferred garden centre at Caniles, a few miles south-east of Baza – but it turns out that the garden centre was closed (somewhat dumb on a Saturday when people have time to go plant shopping).

So, after a nice coffee outside in the sun at nearby Hotel Argos, we headed back into Caravaca to the oddly-named Ekoprix store which turns out to be a general supermarket, just on the edge of town (see photo at the top of this entry).

Nothing special about the store, slightly more expensive than Lidl but handy for parking.

But what did we find next door – a store selling everything from outdoor furniture through reasonably-priced solar lighting (cheap compared to other stores we’ve seen selling the latter in Spain) and we bought ourselves a pressure washer (reasonably priced compared to Amazon) to help combat the awful dust all over the house exterior paintwork – so a worthwhile trip in the end not to mention a nice day out. Of course as I’ve already discovered there’s a fine line between removing Sahara dust and removing the paint – and for loose paint there’s an overlap between the two.

Note in the photo sbove the €8 price tag for 7 solar lamps – that works out similar to pre-Covid UK pricing of garden lights. The pretty-coloured solar flicker lights were around €5 each.

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