Today is Friday. Our last Friday in Spain. We are pretty much in “getting ready to go” mode now.
Since I was up so late last night, again, I was in bed until about noon. Today we had some pretty cool weather. It was more or less clear this morning but the storms rolled in over the hill this evening and we had quite an amazing thunderstorm and heavy rain.
This morning we had to get up and get moving because we had shopping that needed to be handled down in Motril. So we needed to drive down there and figure out how to do things.
It was about half past midnight when we set out after I had showered and the kids were ready. The drive went fine. Dominica tried to use directions instead of following the signs which I keep telling her that a quick look at a map and using the signs is generally so much better. The directions were wrong and sent us off to the east on the highway and cost us at least twenty minutes of backtracking. I avoided the directions completely and we managed to find our way to the Alcampo going a completely different direction.
Parking at the Alcampo in Motril is super easy. They have their own parking garage and it is completely free. That was awesome. Alcampo is a little bit like the Spanish Walmart or a little more like a Super Target. It is higher end than Walmart but is an enormous department store with everything you could imagine but pretty cheap. We are pretty disappointed that we did not learn about this place until now when it is time for us to be leaving Spain. We would have been using this place all along! What an awesome store. There is everything here.
Our trip to Alcampo was specifically to find some low cost luggage to use for our trip back home. The luggage that we have is just too small and we needed a large, rough, firm sided piece of luggage and we were able to get something here quite inexpensively. While we were there we did a little extra shopping around too. We found “Cool Cream Cheese” Doritos which were pretty hilarious.
After the Alcampo we went to the Aki which is right next door and is, more or less, like a Home Depot that is primarily focused on the garden section more than the building. Maybe no building at all, we did not look around all that much. We were there to see about replacing the umbrella for the upper terrace that had blown away and gotten destroyed. We were unable to find a matching umbrella and decided to just let the people who own the house replace it and bill us for it. Had we found a matching one we would have just gotten it now.
From there we drove back up to Órgiva and tried to get lunch. We went to the Moroccan place that we love, Baraka, and found that it was closed again, for the third week in a row. It was then that Dominica realized that they are Muslim and of course they are closed on Fridays. I was not even thinking about the fact that it was Friday at all. That explains why the last three times we were unable to get food there. That really sucks that something so simple eluded us. We’ve missed so many chances to eat there since living here. We are pretty bummed about that.
So we returned up the mountain and I got started on work and Dominica made us lunch.
Today was not crazy at work, more normal. I worked until about one in the morning and decided that it was going to be an “early” day for me. I have done really late nights pretty much all week and need to get to bed tonight.
This is it, our finally weekend in Spain. So sad. We have no plans this weekend so that we can spend the time getting everything ready so that we can head to Norway. Technically we leave on Tuesday, but it is very, very early Tuesday morning and the options are either to get a hotel in Malaga and leave our village on Monday morning and work from Malaga on Monday evening or to work in our village until the last minute and have the car all packed up and ready to go and when I am done with work head right to the car, drive to Malaga, get on the plane and fly to Norway without getting any sleep making it feel, to me, like I am traveling on Monday night instead. Neither option is very good but the second one is cheaper and aligns more closely with my current sleep schedule and I think that that is probably what we are going to do in the end.