May 30, 2015: House Shopping By Accident

This is it, our last weekend.  We are so sad.  We really love this village.  We love the region of La Alpujarra.  We love Granada Province and Andalucia.

On the early side today, Mike, who lives down the hill from us and is the other English speaker in town, stopped by to chat with us about Rachel’s package and how we will be able to retrieve it, potentially, from the post office.

We chatted for a while, maybe twenty minutes, sitting on the front steps of the house.  We got a lot of the news from around town and made a strategy for talking to the postman come noon on Monday.  Things are getting tight for getting the package.  It was attempted to be delivered a full six days ago, on Monday, but we were still on our way back from Morocco and no one told us at all.  So we have been in the dark all week and we did not have tracking information so we had little idea of what to do.  Now the picture is starting to all come together.  It arrived with a ton of postage due and the people who handle that stuff for the house had no idea what was going on and were not going to pay a small fortune for a random package that they knew nothing about.  So now we do not know if the package has been returned or what the status is.

This is partially why we were in Órgiva on Friday morning.  Mike had gone to the post office there but found out that the building that handles packages closes at ten in the morning.  So none of us had been able to find out anything about it.  So the plan is, the hope is at least, that on Monday maybe we can at least get some information if not actually get the package somehow.  If we get it we might be making an emergency run up to the outskirts of the far side of Granada to a small village there to find Shawn and Rachel.  If not, Mike is going to see what he can continue to do while in town.  But there is every possibility that the package does not exist anymore anyway.  So, maybe, on Monday we can find that out.

While we were talking to Mike we asked about houses in the area and what kind of money that they go for.  We were visibly surprised at how much he was asking for his own house that was for sale and he offered to show it to us.  So we walked down the street and got a tour.  We were far more surprised by the house itself than by the price he had mentioned.  The house was truly amazing.

It was huge, much larger than we would have guessed with four or five bedrooms, two full baths, two full living rooms, a massive basement, two kitchens inside, an unfinished terrace, a big entrance, lots of cool feature then the big thing… the massive outdoor space.

The outdoor space, which is across a small semi-private road, was really impressive.  I mean really, really impressive.  They have a full private multi-level terrace space out there with two full vegetable gardens, lots of trees, a raised terrace dining area, a “gazebo” sort of enclosure with four stone pillars that is basically a formal, outdoor dining area, there was a large patio with a hot tub on it, a fish pond, double access to the acequia, a little flower garden, a storage building that faced the house and another building that had an outdoor kitchen that was in the gardens!  This was a really crazy outdoor setup!

We had no idea that there was something like this just down the street from us.  We were really impressed.

Dominica and I spent several hours out on the terrace today.  It was cloudy and a storm was rolling in so we sat up there with the laundry that was drying hoping to be able to take it down before the rains hit.  The girls came up and played for a while too.

We are very sad that our time here is ending.  We really love this region.

After the rain started, we took down the laundry and sat out in the rain for a bit but it started coming down rather hard so we moved inside.

I did a bit of catching up with SGL today and have been working on getting all of the pictures from our time here uploaded so that we are done with the Spanish and Moroccan pictures before traveling to Norway.  There will be plenty more pictures from Norway to contend with once we are there, I am sure.