Bedrock

Archive for the ‘spain’ Category

The photo you see above, I took while wandering around the hills, just up from our cave. This is typical of the nearby scenery. One of our neighbours, a Scottish couple, live in a cave even higher up than our own and have a marvellous roundabout in the middle of their garden.

As the weather picks up generally, we’ve had several days recently peaking at 30C. There are a few clouds this morning but this is now very much the exception – still, gives me a little time to update the blog… I’ve also been checking in on the home automation back in the UK to verify that all is well. From what I can tell, it is starting to warm up back in Wark, too.

Last night we had a special treat, imported spiced pork from our friend Antonio (Mr Shark) in Italy.

Not that many people out last weekend – the shops are closed Thursday and Friday as it was a bank holiday – and the weather has been atrocious for the time of year, so we settled down at one of our favourite local restaurants for coffee and tostada.

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We spent most of the week – start of September 2018 with our friends Dave and Karen, travelling at the bottom end of Spain – we made a base just outside of Ronda (just over an hour Northwest of Marbella on extremely winding roads) and from there took a day-trip to Gibraltar.

Above, our hotel, a cute place complete with gardens and a pool, just minutes outside of Ronda.

Below, eating out near Ronda:

For our first night out, after a long and interesting walk through the shopping area, we ate in Ronda itself, not much there to talk about as the cafe food there is mostly Spanish. On our second night we ate out of town, again nothing in the way of international cuisine but we had a good time anyway with plenty of variety, half-decent wine and most importantly, good company.

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Here, Maureen is enjoying the fine weather in early May, down at Puerto De Mazarron.. we spent a couple of days there followed by an un-planned overnight stay in Alicante. Lovely.  Looking forward to meeting new neighbours (and hopefully some nice weather) on our return to Galera, soon.

After a very pleasant day yesterday which saw Simon, Maureen and I travel around the back of mount Sagra (the 5th largest mountain in Spain) and then onto the sadly depleted San Clemente, today, Maureen is planning a quiet day as Simon and I head off to Castril to check out the walk along the gorge.

I’ve been to Castril many times of course but Simon hasn’t so this should be interesting for him. The weather here is settling down now, starting to get cool at night but still very pleasant at 25+ during the day.

And off we go – leaving you with a photo I took looking down at the village of Galera just a couple of nights ago near sunset.

I’m sitting here getting side-tracked reading all about Cascamorras on the excellent One Foot in the Grave blog. Over in Baza the “Festival of Cascamorras” is an interesting fiesta – but I won’t ruin it, go check out the above blog as there’s a full description therein.

So I had this brilliant idea of using a little cheap Chinese power convertor  – to take stored solar power at 24v down to 3.5v to power a set of otherwise defunct (B&M) solar butterflies. One tends not to throw them away un-necessarily here in Spain as for reasons beyond me – despite numerous Chinese stores, solar lights of any description are more expensive here than in the UK!

Well, that didn’t go so well and resulted in 4 dead lights. I’ve since realised why but the answer is a tad technical for here! I’m spending part of my Sunday afternoon fixing this lot while Maureen gets on with various tasks around the house. The sun is out but it feels significantly cooler today.

Not a lot has happened since our mini-trip to Mojacar. We popped down to the village last night and met up with friends for a while. There was some music playing in the town square but the place was generally quiet quiet. We will soon have a friend stopping over for a week.

Meanwhile on 23rd of September there’s a Craft Fair at Velez Rubo (Velez Stores, Pologono Industrial). Looks like it might be interesting – “Indian Curry Tasters” caught my eye.