We’ve certainly had our share of rubbish builders. Whoever our property developer RAMONE used to put out Pergola together needs a GOOD THRASHING!

We recently discovered that the Pergola was loose and so today we’ve had our new builder come and take a look. Turns out the wood was neither treated nor buried in concrete but just stuck in a hole with concrete on the TOP… the result, the wood has ultimately rotted (see end of front right piece in the image below – totally rotted).

And so as you see in the photo, the whole lot is now dismantled and we’re starting again from scratch…

The moral of the story?  This might be a one-off- but I doubt it. If you’ve had pergolas put together by the same builder, get them checked – and if necessary re-built before they fall down – and make sure you know where to SEND THE BILL TO!! I know where ours will be going.

Considering the time of year, the weather today was not that bad – sunny pretty much all day and heading toward 20c. We took a trip over to Orce market, which was a little disappointing but while there we noticed a sign for the museum and headed over there. A small entrance on the outside hides a 16th century very nice building which houses the museum.

Once inside we were welcomed in and given full instructions in English before being left to roam freely, not signs to tell you not to use your camera, no big-brother cameras. Very civilised.

We left the museum towards lunchtime and headed over to Huescar (just a few kilometres apart) where FINALLY after much effort and wasted money I found some solder that actually works at the local Ferreteria. There was most likely nothing wrong with my original soldering iron – just the cheap rubbish Chinese crappy solder they supplied with and sold separately from the irons – hard to imagine as to why a retailer could be so thick as to sell soldering irons along with solder that isn’t suitable for those irons – but there you have it. Anyway, along the way today I took some photos and here they are. You can click any photo to enlarge it.

Enjoy the pics… click to enlarge…

Not QUITE what you might expect of a Spanish morning (10am) after months of low humidity… there is a thick fog outside this morning – I’m so glad I’m not planning on driving anywhere. I’ve a ton of work to do today before spending a little holiday time over here. Hopefully by the time I get done, this will have lifted. Already there are signs off the right of the photo of the sun trying to blast through – but it’s quite a sight, standing near the top of the mountains looking down at this cotton wool stuff!

Our builder is supposed to be coming over today to fix the pergola – which looks quite sad in this weather but believe me in the summer it’s essential. Still – the fog will no doubt please the plants.

A far cry from the height of summer, Galera in Autumn is, well, a little, ordinary kind of town… Thursday night, the night the Brits supposedly head off to the pubs – nothing, nobody, zilch.

After a day’s solid (virtual) meetings and website designing I headed off down to the village to check the local gossip. Not a British soul in sight!  Thankfully I’m comfortable enough at the local pizza bar to sit and have a billy-no-mates night. I could not believe it – not a single British soul – worse, no-one that looked like they might speak English either – which is a bit of a problem when your Spanish skills amount to "2 beers please" and "sorry I don’t speak any Spanish". Thank heavens for Facebook and text messages.

Still, a nice warm fire courtesy of our new wood supplier makes all the difference. I have to pick Maureen up from the Airport sometime Saturday and the car rental company were kind enough to desperately need the car back to sell it (times must be tough) so they’re paying for the trip (not insignificant – a full tank there and back to Murcia airport – though why they call it that when it’s miles away from Murcia I don’t know). Meanwhile it looks like we’re now the owners of a Spanish car so hopefully being ripped off by car rental agencies will soon become a thing of the past.

I’m counting on tomorrow being a much quieter day and maybe tonight’s rain shower (the one the  useless forecasters said had no chance of happening) will clear the air. 19c and sunny – apparently…

Even a quiet place like Galera has it’s share of Feral children – apparently two of them took a dip in our pool today in our absence.  I’ve yet to check the stills stored on the web to see if we’ve caught them on film – shouldn’t take long to track them down via Facebook etc – but thanks to Tom our neighbour at least we know that everything is ok.  An iron bar and locks will be appearing as soon as we can contact a builder.

If anyone does happen to spot something like this in future if we’re not at home, we’d really appreciate photos.

If you’re in Spain and wondering, yes, it’s raining back in Blighty – again. Can’t wait to get back…. for a little more sun before the winter sets in for good.

On Friday we set off from Galera to see friends Angie and Dennis down to the area around Cuevas Del Almanzora, near VERA, in Almeria. One of the problems with Spain is… it’s big and in rural areas there are simply not that many main routes – so you might be looking at the map on the right and thinking “surely there’s a straight line from A to B – well, no.

However, the route is pretty much motorway except for a short stretch at either end.

Arriving mid-afternoon Friday we all promptly went off to the beach and then after coming back to their place for a chat and a dip in the pool (remember we’re talking upper 30s temperature here – water’s pretty much part of the day’s entertainment) ended up in a nice little nightspot area nearby for drinks.

The following day we went back to the beach and after a battle with the (not insignificant) waves in which I ended up peddle-dashing my knee on the rocks – after fighting to get back on my feet without getting a mouth-full of salt water, I discovered I’d lost my specs in the sea – hardly a good start to the weekend as you can imagine.

Thinking about it, writing this blog isn’t much fun without specs – so guess where we’re going tomorrow – well today as it’s 1.45am already Monday morning. Anyway, we ended up in a really nice restaurant Saturday night to finish off a very pleasant weekend break. We spent most of Sunday morning driving back up to Galera, but managed on the way to find a great market near Vera (and temporary sunglasses for me – I normally wear reactolite varifocals). Spanish rural markets are much of a much-ness – you see the same Indian guys selling fake watches and fake sunglasses, but the quantity and variety of fruit and veg is worth seeing and in this case there was quite a large covered-over area selling plants, much to Maureen’s delight.

We got home mid-Sunday afternoon and as it was too hot to do anything outside, I finally got my two new remote cameras working…lots of improvements over earlier models – these allow 2-way audio as well as quite decent imagery, though being cheap Chinese IP cameras the audio is nothing to write home about…. at least now I’ll be able to keep an eye on both the UK and Spain on the iPhone… handy given the increasing unemployment rate in both countries!!

Oh, so there’s this puppy who seems to have adopted ourselves and our neighbours…he’s cute as well until he craps in the garden and starts barking at 1.30am – just after some “caller unknown” has rang twice on Skype and THREE have left YET ANOTHER stupid message saying how cheap calls are in Spain (despite being instructed verbally 3 times not to ever send me a text again). It’s going to be a long night…

Don’t forget you can see larger versions of most images by clicking on these smaller ones. More pics here on Google Albums