Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

 

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.

 

Our second day of having the house to ourselves.  It is weird to be all alone here.  And very odd that we are making our plans for leaving Spain already.  We are very sad about that.  We absolutely love it here and cannot wait to be back in the fall.  The time away is going to be tough.

I slept in but not nearly as late as my going to bed at six this morning would make you think that I would.  It was really a quiet day, very little happening here.  The weather is great, bright and sunny but not too warm.  It is no wonder that people love Spain.  It has all the benefits of the summer in the US but without the crazy heat.

The flies are still completely insane.  They are all over us, all of the time.  Every moment of the day we are covered in flies and it is driving us bonkers.  At least in the last week the bees have all gone away and the ants have become a much less invasive pest.  It is like the insects come in waves, like the plagues.  First it was the ants, then the bees and now the flies.  I have to say, the flies are the worst and the bees were the best.  Other than scaring the women folk, the bees did nothing.  The ants were nasty and we had to keep doing things to get rid of them but they did not actually bother you.  The flies, they get on your face and on your head.  They climb on my hands as I type.  They get in and on everything.

Played a little Tropico today but very little, maybe an hour tops.  MangoLassi was crazy busy today.  After the updates last night it was hopping with activity.  And the site help up really well too.

I found out today that my boss is going to be out of the office for, more or less, a season so I have a feeling that a lot of my plans for work over the summer have just changed and that I am not going to be going out to California in late June like I had been expecting.  Just what I am doing, I do not know, that will need to be determined.  So all of our planning about how I am getting from one place to another and when – whether by car or plane or whatever – is unknown.  That seems to be pretty much par for the course around here, though.

I am slowly working through a month long backlog of pictures on Flickr.  They are finally all uploaded and visible but many are not rotated correctly or labeled or whatever so I am working on that.

Dominica and the girls went to bed at a reasonable time today.  I did not get to bed until five in the morning.  My schedule is all thrown off.  Slowly getting SGL caught up too.  At least two posts per day, three if at all possible.

Today is our first day in our Cáñar home just as a family in nearly a month.  It was four weeks ago that Ryan came to visit us for a few days and Rachel and Shawn arrived at the same time that he left to return to the US.  It seems rather strange having the house to ourselves again after all of this time and having the guest bedroom as an extra room for us to use (the girls slept there last night and Dominica used it as a reading room this morning.)

Rachel and Shawn are safely in their “home” in Granada as of last night.  They are not happy to have to be working now instead of getting a bit of a vacation and time to relax and explore.  They will not have a free day at all until Sunday!

Both Dominica and Rachel are pretty sick today.  Food poisoning or something, they think.  It might just be a sensitivity to the food in Morocco.  It might just be from all of the traveling.  Who knows.  Shawn and I are fine, though.

A very slow day today.  We did pretty much nothing.  We both played some Tropico 4 this morning.  I worked until very late again tonight.  It is really just a normal work week for me here in Spain.

Tonight, after work, I put in some work on MangoLassi, Gamrhaus and the Kidding Around Europe Communities as the NodeBB codebase is up to 0.7.0 and it is a major update.  So I was up until six in the morning working on that.

Like many days, we all slept in quite a bit this morning.  Last night was a late one as Rachel, Shawn and I were spending what time we could together before they had to leave today.  They had gotten mostly packed up last night and today, when they got up, we barely got to see them at all as they were busy getting everything packed and heading to the car as soon as they good.  I was up around noon, but spent the morning playing some Tropico as I have not been able to play for several days and am looking for some down time to just relax.

It was just after two when Rachel and Shawn, loaded up with all of their stuff that they have not had to carry on their backs like this for nearly a month, were out the door and the girls were standing on the first floor terrace waving to them as they went up to the plaza and off to their car to drive up to Granada Airport.

Dominica and I just took it easy today.  I am back to work today so had a bit to keep me busy.  Dominica came up to the kitchen and sat with me and played Tropico 4 on her laptop so that we could spend time together.  Today she played so much that she has caught up to me and pulled ahead of me.

We kept up with Shawn and Rachel while they were dealing with stuff in Granada.  They dropped off the car no problem and had to wait at the airport a couple of hours to get their bus to go wherever they had to go, which they were not aware of were that was for a while.

It was very late in the day by the time that they finally got to the house where they are staying and working for the next week or so.  It turned out to be very far north of Granada where they had thought that they were going to be.  They are in a small village far to the north west of Granada nearly halfway to Jáen.  They are outside of Alcalá la Real.

I worked very late tonight, until about four in the morning.  Dominica and the girls were in bed long, long before me.

At this point, every day is our “last of that day” in Spain.  Today was our last Tuesday.  We really can’t believe that we have to leave so soon.