Bedrock

Our last day for a short while and the weather is absolutely marvellous, accordingly Maureen and I went off to the lake so she could collect some rocks…

In the process we ended up having lunch at the excellent lakeside cafe, NOT CHEAP I hasten to add but the view is magnificent (and I skipped breakfast and so was GAGGING for something to eat).

That’s where we spent the morning. Some of you looking in here might think I’ve pulled the same trick as the holiday companies with the editor on some of these shots – but I’ve not. There are two types of photo here, panoramas and HDR (to capture the range of dark to light) and that’s about it – cropped and dumped into this blog.. Amazing what you can do with an iPhone, the right software and just a little time and effort.

If I could have stopped here for another week, this morning alone was worth the trip as you’ll see. Enjoy the photos and please do click on them to see larger versions.

And if you want more.. I’ve put the whole series up onto Google Web Albums. Enjoy.

Día de la Tortilla occurs on the Thursday before Lent – and apparently this means everyone goes off into the countryside and eats Spanish omelette in a communal picnic.

Or, put another way, the BARS are closed. We found one bar open thankfully and had a nice drink with some of the Brits.

TODAY (Friday) we went off to the Renault dealer in Huescar in search of a replacement radiator pipe – a simple looking item but guess what – you can’t buy the PIPE, you have to buy the ASSEMBLY – which means replacing a load of kit that works perfectly and shelling out £140 in the process. Thankfully the dealer managed enough English to point us in the direction of duct tape! A trip to the Ferreteria and we’ve a radiator pipe that works as good as new – though it does look a little Heath Robinson. I’ll find some proper pipe somewhere when we get back.

We then went in search of lunch and on the way spotted a procession marching through the town… no need for explanations so here are a bunch of photos… marvellous. Feel free to click on the images for larger versions.

Ultimately, everything we do is temporary, even the giant stainless steel and glass structures won’t last forever – but the builders here have taken temporary to a new art form…

See image below – electricity meter just down the road from us. Work of art.

The weather was so nice this afternoon we went for a walk – and I always have the camera ready… here’s something else we spotted on the way, looks like Dyson’s going into the caravan business. Cute, huh!

Not much else happening, sun is going down, it’s going to be a cold night and so a night in front of the fire is likely. Huescar market tomorrow morning – and the week’s treat at the market – CHUROS – or fried dough if you want to be basic about it!

What an interesting day! We left Galera at 9am sharp and headed off to the outskirts of Murcia for a spot of shopping. Murcia is about 2 hours drive East for us and on the way, the temperature rose from just a few degrees to around 12c or so, sunny most of the way but with a little wind – to keep that in perspective we didn’t bother with coats when shopping. First stop Ikea at the Avenida de Juan de Borbón, Murcia.

Our cave gets very dark at night, well, pitch black so I was pleased to find some little adhesive movement sensor lights for the staircase… marvellous little devices which worked out at around 2 Euros each (packs of 2) – amazing value. Maureen bought a table (which no doubt I’ll get landed with assembling today). Next stop the nearby shopping centre and the Chinese junk store and on to the centre itself, somewhat smaller than, say the Gateshead MetroCentre but respectable non-the-less.

The Spanish excel at TV stores and so we ended up in SATURN 2, a massive store with everything from TVs through cameras, PCs through electric heaters. Pride of place in the store was a 100" LCD monitor costing a mere 22,000 Euros!! Needless to say we didn’t buy it.

After lunch, a mediocre affair within the centre, we headed off down to the coast to Torrevieja, about an hour’s drive just to take a look around. The temperature continued to rise but unfortunately the clouds also set in, contrary to weather forecasts. Interesting place, with a mix of absolutely DIRE touristy places on the one hand and on the other, some very up-market hotels and housing areas, well worth a couple of hours.

We had a very interesting walk along the sea front, taking in the view, seeing some VERY expensive yachts, a black submarine and a shipwreck! There was a market but it didn’t look worth investigating. The town smacked of a British tourist dump with lots of stuff in English – which kind of ruins the experience for me.

Around teatime we set off on the 3+ hour journey back home to Galera, expecting the temperatures to drop but not expecting blisteringly cold, almost impassable SNOW – which is what came out of the blue when we got as far as BULAS on the way back… we spent the remainder of the journey following 2 trucks which we could barely see and wondering if we were going to make it back… yet amazingly when we got as far as just outside of our village – it stopped – no sign of snow, rain or… well, anything really. We popped into the local bar for a pint and a pizza to warm up before heading off home for the night.

Quite an eventful day. I’ll leave you with some more photos…

Didn’t get up until around 10am this morning (9am UK time) – with double comforters as it’s a little chilly… I could have quite comfortably stayed there all day… but – we had to go find a plumber to get some repairs done to a burst pipe and so off we went into the village, stopping by Don and Carol’s place to see their pellet heater, a very efficient modern, remote controlled beast. Next stop the village and we managed to get the contact details of a plumber who turned up within the hour to fix the pipe! Job done.

We spent the afternoon doing odd jobs and a spot of reading before heading off to Huescar, encountering a bunch of sheep on the way as you see in the photo above. First stop the Chinese junk store then some groceries before filling the car up for our trip to Murcia tomorrow (to buy a table!!) and now we’re back at the cave, armed with groceries, warm as toast… and about to select a movie from NetFlix to watch. 

I spent part of the afternoon testing the new VPN solution to let us watch the likes of the BBC iPlayer and CatchupTV over here, after a couple of false starts and some amazingly fast technical responses from the HIDEMYASS people, we’re up and running. I checked out TOP GEAR on the iPlayer to make sure it works  – no problem.

So, some travelling tomorrow… quite looking forward to it – guaranteed sunshine and blue skies though it’s unlikely to get TOO much above zero degrees C before lunchtime!

Arrived yesterday (Saturday), after doing the usual shopping round in San Javier and visiting my favourite Chinese junk store therein.

As you can see, the weather here in February at the coast is not that bad – it’s not summer that’s for sure but you could sit outside and drink coffee at the coast, no problem. For the first time we picked up our own car (usually we do car rentals but if you check earlier posts, we bought a Spanish car in the summer and so this was it’s first test). The storage company guy who dropped it off at the airport (right at the arrivals door – we only ended up walking 4 metres out of the airport!) spoke good English and warned us the battery had gone flat in storage (they check the car and get it working if there is an issue), perhaps not surprising as it’s been sitting doing nothing for 3 months – but as we found out – it was working perfectly and still is 30 hours later.

Our new (old) Spanish Renault Mégane is so quiet when idling you would think it was turned off… and so we had a great 2-hour trip over to our place but not before checking out Aldi and the Chinese store and getting supplies for the week over at San Javier – definitely my favourite place to shop for food and rubbish up to now.

We arrived at teatime Saturday to discover that AT LAST we had proper electricity but no water… it’s sunny and several degrees here in the mountains during the day but it’s been quite cold at night. This morning Maureen got the hair drier out and the water is running but there’s a hairline crack in the cheap Chines crappy water valve…  no surprise there, most of the other stuff the original builder put in was, well, crap.

We took a slightly different and longer route than normal, partly as we decided to manage without the satellite and partly because – well, it was such a nice day.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not summer and along the way we could see the snow in the mountains but for much of the trip the temperature stayed up near 10 degrees or so and perfectly clear skies, dry air and no wind which makes all the difference.

We opened the place up – no surprises other than the odd length of silica trying to fight it’s way through the concrete walls – nothing new there and easy to sort out in the summer… and after getting some heat going we went off to the local pub for a pint – so much for the diet.

Today, as I promised the neighbours, I put up some solar lights we brought over onto the tree on our newly re-furbished roundabout (not enough, needs more) and spent some time getting the NetFlix TV working properly on our limited broadband here in Spain – with great success – see the blog at www.scargill.net for getting Netflix and iPlayer working over here…  and I caught up with paperwork – not to mention both of us watching the best movie of all time (IMHO) – Iron Man 2 – AGAIN… the opening scene with AC/DC playing and Iron Man landing on stage has to be the best movie scene ever. I can’t wait for the Avengers movie coming out in May which will also feature The Hulk, Thor and Captain America to name a few – now they’ve pretty much gotten over the need to make these movies funny for people who never read Marvel, they really are doing a good job. A shame the CD Comics people seem to have missed the boat.

Tomorrow we need to get a hairline crack in the cold water feed tap fixed (well, we need to replace the tap – easy enough other than finding out where on earth the main tap for the area is!) so we need to organise a plumber, then we’re off to the local market to see what’s new. As always you can click on these pics for larger versions, hope you find this interesting.