Bedrock

GREAT start to the day… my Spanish credit card ran out a couple of months ago due to them giving shorter timeouts than UK cards (and being in the UK I was not using it). So last week we went off to the bank to get things organised – meanwhile another bank in BAZA ate Maureen’s card, no doubt due to our bank not understanding our simple request for another card for me… anyway… it was all meant to be sorted out by Tuesday…

Yesterday the plan was to go to Granada after popping into the bank for 2 replacement cards… WELL, our  trip out was slightly put back by the local bank NOT having our credit cards as promised – and just to round it off, as we returned from the bank in Galera to our parked car, a young truck driver smashed our parked car!!! Nice! Notice the utterly ruined mirror! I took millions of photos leading to the inexorable conclusion that our car was innocently parked, minding it’s own business when the truck driver smashed into it… all reported etc… lets see how that works with the insurance company – last time we ended up paying out for months before getting our money back (at that time a truck jack-knifed and ended up with us briefly doing 60mph backwards on the motorway, writing off the car).

If at first you don’t succeed.. it’s a good job I’m mechanically minded, the utterly SMASHED electric mirror was within half an hour road-legal and pretty from a distance if somewhat inclined to pointing into thin air.. but it worked.

So that was our starter for the day… 1.25 hours later we were in Granada to pick up my required NETWORKING cable (see earlier blog on “broadband woes”).  According to the weather forecast it was going to pour with rain for the day and so we didn’t take any swimming gear or stand-by overnight bag etc.

We arrived in Granada and headed off straight to junction 123 to my favourite commercial area and the MediaMarkt store to get the networking cable. By the time we got done there it was mid-day, sunny and 33 degrees C – so much for the weather forecast – we decided we really must make something of the day other than shopping and Maureen reminded me that we’d decided to go take a look at a nearby town in the hills that she’d seen on the web.

And so off we went. Within 20 minutes of suffering the very weirdly setup-up Android Sat-Nav and ending up back in the middle of Granada in a series of ever-diminishing circles, we switched to my iPhone Tomtom and off we went. The nearby village turned out to be 1.5 hours south of Granada but never mind as we had the most FANTASTIC day ending up in a marvellous area and loving every minute of it.

First stop was a little town called Lanjaron, around 50km from Granada and positioned in the western Las Alpujarras. Apparently (we didn’t know this) it is generally considered the gateway to the region. We stopped for lunch at the “Meson El Salado” and 27 Euros later came away quite satisfied if slightly startled at the cost.

Ignore for now the fact that the back of Maureen’s head is missing – such is the nature of sequential-image swept panoramas – but I’m using them more and more because sometimes they really are the only way to convey the atmosphere that normal photos just don’t capture.

As we wandered back to the car, Maureen spotted the building below which needs some work… but imagine this fully restored… up in the mountains…

We continued our journey and on the way spotted what looked like larger than normal windmills way up in the mountains…

I have to say that photos UTTERLY fail to put this across… from the road these just look like BIG windmills – but there’s a loose-stone road going to every one of them and so we drove down to the first one we came to as you can see – the guy in the blue shirt is me. The first thing you notice is the sound of POWER.. the massive turbine blades which almost defy belief, constantly, slowly turning and with the most eyrie whooshing noise… standing next to the units is awe-inspiring and makes you wonder how on EARTH people install these monsters at sea.  I can see why people so powerfully defend them as they’re really a thing of beauty (sadly not a great deal of use when it’s not windy) and a testament to 21st century human engineering achievement. If you feel I’m talking bollocks I can only suggest finding one of the larger units and seeing for yourself as close as I was – utterly amazing. What’s also really nice is the utter absence of wires – which are all underground. 

We continued our journey, ending up in the village of Capileira, recorded as 1436 metres from sea level and the most northerly of the three villages in the gorge of the Poqueira river in the Las Alpujaras district of the province of Granada. You can look this up in Wikipedia but to be honest their description ia very clinical and just fails to get across the sheer magic of the area.

Suffice it to say, we’re going back as soon as possible – we’ll include an overnight stay and the camera will be at the ready to try and capture what for me competes well with anything I’ve seen in the VAR region of France and absolutely beats Britain’s lake district hands down.

On the way home later in the evening, the heavens opened up North of Granada we saw some of the most beautiful rainbows in living memory – the photo below kind of gets the idea across but doesn’t really capture the colours – note that in this panorama you can see there’s a complete arc – what you may JUST see is the secondary ring further out – which was quite clear to onlookers. This rainbow lasted a good part of the 2.5 hour journey back home until finally the sun set in the hills and the rainbow was no more!

Yesterday was the big day for videoconferencing… I ran an IT meeting from here in the cave… 9 people in 6 locations in 3 countries – or rather attempted it.  After the biggest downpour of rain here in Galera I’ve seen in summertime… yesterday morning I  got up to find that one of my ADVENT over-the-mains Internet units had blown itself to pieces (less than 2 years old). Fortunately I started with a pack of 3 so I had a spare… which promptly refused to connect reliably. 

So armed with a less than ideal signal and Skype BETA (handles multiple video locations), GotoMeeting and my various documents ready to go for a meeting that started at 10am UK time, we started on time – to echos… no matter what we did, we got feedback and echoing.. we scrapped Skype and used Gotomeeting on it’s own with mics on mute until requested.. and so it was we managed several hours of meeting in 3 countries. I’ve a suspicion the problems were down to one site not set up properly but hey… still something new we’d not done before!

The weather picked up and so I decided the answer to the WIFI issue was to re-site the one router so it is line of site for upstairs AND downstairs – a mere matter of 8 metres of network cable and a small cupboard to mount the lot at the bottom of the stairs. 5pm, off we went to Huescar – and returned empty-handed. The electrical shop was closed and not one of the furniture shops we looked at had such a thing as a small cabinet. If we’d had a B&Q I’d have wrapped things up in one store.

So, as is often the case, it’s a trip to Granada (namely Carrefour and Brico-Depot) to sort out the bits we need. I’m hoping the weather is going to be nice for the drive and perhaps we’ll take in a bus tour.

If you’ve an iPhone incidentally you can now read these blogs in a special theme for the iPhone – just punch in the normal web address and you’ll get a special version of the blog.

A pleasant surprise this evening – we were sitting watching David Attenborough “Life on Earth” – probably one of the best TV programs ever… and we had a knock on the door from our Spanish neighbours from over the hill.

Completely unexpected, they brought us a case of wine from GALERA! As you can see from the photo, there’s white, rose and red wine. What a pleasant surprise and a really nice thing to do! Quite made my day!

So all in all not a bad day, sorted the broadband out (cable replacement), discovered where to get cement for fixing pavements – really cheap (under £2 a sizeable bag) and soon we’re to the village for some tapas… there have been a few clouds today but other than that it’s been generally sunny, maybe 34 degrees… just the job. I’m all ready for my meeting tomorrow, the most complex videoconference I’ve done to date….  fingers crossed…

The little fellow you see on the right was at our doorstep yesterday, if I’d included his tail the photo would be well over twice as long – absolutely massive!   I’m hoping no-one is going to tell me they’re poisonous as they really are cute! The nasty on the LEFT however, I’m quite sure if I was smaller and he was bigger… he’d EAT me.

Well, that was an interesting overnight experience. I got up in the middle of the night with an urge to do some forum testing (amazing the things you think of on holiday – I’ve been putting together a vBulletin forum for the FSB and it’s been giving me installation issues) and…. no broadband.

Regular readers will know I had a problem last week and it turned out it was the connector to the Iberbanda dish… well I checked the connector – seemed fine.. and this morning I went up the road to a neighbour who also has the same setup – he’s had no problems… so back to the cave. As the alternative was to ring up Iberbanda who are not the best English speaking company in the world, I poked a hole in the insect mesh and shoved my last decent network cable through in a last-ditch effort – on the hope that a replacement cable might do the job.

I didn’t really expect much but SURE ENOUGH, not only do they use crappy cement over here, they use crappy cables as well! The broadband is working better than ever, I’ve scrapped the original cable and put in a bright new orange one!

Some kind of holiday celebration today so the shops are all closed tonight.  Sun is back out and I’ve no need to contact the office until teatime here so a little sun, I think!

What a weekend… with the weather back in full glorious sunshine, we took off for BAZA.  Down to one Spanish credit card, as mine is out of date, we headed off to the bank to get some cash. Well, the bank machine ate Maureen’s card, so that put the kybosh on some things for the weekend… however we managed and then went off to get some paint etc. The paint was a write-off – the shop didn’t like Maureen’s UK cards (they’re not a very trusting lot) and so despite the bargain price of 17 euros for 13 litres of Pinctura Plastica, we came away empty handed. 

I got my monitor wall bracket and my new Spanish SIM for the mobile phone… 12 euros gives you the SIM and 6 euros of credit. You have to use the phone and update the credit once every 6 months which isn’t bad….certainly cheaper than paying 10 euros a month for a Spanish VOIP line we don’t use! I put the TV bracket on the wall after several unsuccessful attempts and lots of plastering! Anyway, we ended up at a new (for us) bar just outside of Huescar – nothing to write home about – and then a cave restaurant which WOULD have been great had it not been full of noisy kids… but we had a nice night anyway.

Maureen’s been staining fences today and I’ve been trying to figure out how the comms dish works (finally got talking to it’s built in web server) as well as repairing the bathroom (a slight crack in the paint was hiding a 12” square hole in the wall, now full of cement) and generally having a nice wasted day.

Yesterday after upgrading the Fed’s new vBulletin site I realised that part of it wasn’t working so I’ve been sending messaged back and forth to their designers today to sort it out…. nice that they work on weekends.

And now – I think a beer…

This is where we find out whether the oft-repeated phrase bears any weight… it’s time for bed, Maureen is already fast asleep in the living room – and there’s a huge salamander wandering around on the living room wall, 10ft up… no IDEA how he/she managed to get in here….  will we be able to ignore it and give up for the night?

Update: Morning – no sign of him…