Sheep Guarding Llama

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.

Today is our day to return from Morocco to Spain. I do not have to be “back at work” until tomorrow afternoon but we figured that trying to get back to Cáñar tomorrow would have just way too hectic and risky and not worth it.  So instead we have a semi-leisurely day today to work our way back with the expectation that we might not get back to our village until after midnight.  Going back today also made it so that Shawn and Rachel can return the rental car easily tomorrow afternoon.

We started the day at the riad.  We had breakfast around eight thirty.  The same delicious bread selection and eggs that we had yesterday.  Dominica and Luciana were not able to join us while we ate but came up around nine to eat.  When they came up I went down to settle the bill and take care of that stuff.

As with nearly everything in Morocco (and many things in Europe) just because they have a credit card sign on the door and advertise that they take credit cards doesn’t mean that they take credit cards.  We needed cash, and a lot of it, to settle the bill.  We had been working very hard to have our cash down to zero so that we could leave Morocco this morning.  We had been calculating this carefully.  We were very, very short on paying the bill.  This was very frustrating.

Thankfully the taxi driver covered the tab for us and we were able to pay him later.  This is the same taxi driver with the SsangYong that we have seen every day.

It took a bit yet to get everyone ready and into the cab.  Then we drove to the ATM and got cash to pay for the hotel and the driver.  I could not get enough from a single ATM transaction to cover the train, though.  We figured that we would have to just get our tickets with a credit card at the station.

Our driver dropped us at Gare Fes.  There was plenty of time to get tickets and get on the train.  Rachel and Shawn stayed with the girls while Dominica and I went to buy the tickets back to Tanger.  And thus began our next adventure in travel woes.

We went through the entire line for tickets where they had a sign that they took credit cards and when we got to the front, again, they did not take credit cards.  Pretty much the entire line was people there to pay with credit card and getting turned away when they got to the front.  They sent us to an ATM across the way.

When we got to the ATM there were Americans there from Maryland complaining that the ATM did not work.  We tried it and, the moment you put in your pin the machine went blank and did nothing.  Thankfully, eventually, it spit the card back out.  But it made no attempt at getting you cash or anything.  So, we knew instantly that there was a skimmer on this machine and our data had been stolen.  Wonderful.  Now on top of everything else we know that we have a compromised debit card and we need to deal with that super fast or our bank account is going to be drained.  What a morning.  Now we have no money, no access to money and no way to get train tickets.

We tried some automated ticket machines but they did not work either.  We spent at least fifteen minutes trying to buy tickets that way.  OCNF customer service even came over to see if they could help.  Nothing worked.  The station we wanted would cause the machine to restart.  There was no way to get kids’ tickets.  Paying didn’t work.  Nothing.  Just did not work at all.

Finally, after thirty minutes of trying one thing after another customer service finally took us back to the desk and took our debit card there.  All of this could have been avoided and tons of our time, our compromised debit card and customer service’s time had they just done what they said that they would do in the first place when they advertised that they took credit cards!

We got tickets, first class again, in cabin number nine (the very last one available) on the train heading to Tanger and pretty much had to run for the train.  To make things more hectic, once we were on the platform someone gave us directions in the wrong direction to first class.  So we had to traverse the length of the train twice.

Once we were on we were quickly underway.  At least we were on the train, in first class and in a cabin to ourselves again.  The worst of things was now over.

I immediately set about trying to cancel the debit card.  It is a holiday in the US which will make that more complicated.  I tried calling the customer service number but, of course, the foolish bank only gives an 800 number which, of course you cannot call from outside of the US!  How short sighted is that?  Why use an 800 number which saves no one money when they could spend less and actually protect customers with a normal number?

I texted dad.  It was five in the morning where he is in New York but he was awake and in a little bit was able to call in and cancel the card.  That was a relief but it would not be until tomorrow morning before we would be able to look at the account and see if any money was taken out before we were able to stop the card.

The train journey was quiet and uneventful.  We had no cash to get food from the cart because every bit of cash that we had was necessary for getting the taxi from the train station in Tanger to the ferry terminal.  We were running very, very lean and as it was were going to have to tip in Euros.

We all just relaxed on the train.  Everyone napped a little bit except for me.  I got to watch all of the scenery again, which was fun.

It was a good time when we got to Tanger.  We were able to squeeze into a Grand Taxi again and zip over to the port.  We emptied out all of our Moroccan cash, tipped in Euros and were onto the ferry in no time.  We made it for the four o’clock boat and were the very first people to get onto the ferry so we had every seat to chose from.  We actually chose the exact same seats that we use two days ago.  We all even sat in the same ones.

We tried to get food on the ferry, but their credit card machine could not connect.  Will this ever end?  My card is cancelled now so even with an ATM I cannot get cash.  We were stuck on the ferry too, without any food or drinks.  At least the ferry trip is a short one.

This time I convinced Dominica to go out on the deck as I was sure that she would feel better.  She did and she did.   Much better.  I stayed inside with the girls where it was warm and uncomfortable but the motion of the ship really did not bother me.

Once in Tarifa we got through security and were back in Spain.  We got out to the parking lot where I was able to prove to Dominica that the people two days ago had been lying to her about discounted parking options to get her to go away.  It was full price, no exceptions.  We tried paying in the automated caja but that did not work.  Thankfully there was an attendant and we were able to pay her the something like one hundred and twenty Euros to get our cars!

We were off and on the road home.  We had a great time in Morocco but are glad to be back home in Spain too.  Everyone is looking forward to getting home and getting a rest.

We went east out of Tarifa towards Algeciras and I pulled into the mirador that has a refreshment stand there.  I have been past there twice before and always wanted to stop and was very happy that we managed to stop this time.  The views from here to Mt. Moses and Morocco are amazing.  The snack bar there had big sandwiches, ice cream and other food so we had our meal there since finally someone took credit cards!  Ah, Spain.

The food was actually good and now that all of our challenges of the day are over we were pretty excited to just sit for an hour and relax.  We sat outside to eat at first but it was way too windy and we eventually moved inside once some other people left and the space was free.  We took lots of pictures while we were there, it is a very unique view.

It was early evening when we got on the road and started the long drive from the mirador back to Órgiva.  This was uneventful and being tired we just took the toll road to speed things up.  We encountered no problems and were back in Órgiva before it was super late, but nearly everything was closed.  We stopped on the main drag and I took Dominica’s credit card and got as much cash as we could out of the telebanco hoping that it would still work and hoping that if someone was still attacking it that we would at least have that much less money in there for them to touch.  It worked and we got cash and were very happy.

Up the mountain we went, parked and were home.  Finally back home.

It was late enough that all of the bars in town were already closed.  We thought that it was an emergency but Rachel discovered two bottles of red wine in the house and I found a white one in the fridge.  Rachel, Shawn and I went up to the terrace to enjoy the quiet views of the twinkling lights down in Órgiva and polished off the last three bottles before retiring for the night.

Today was our last day with Shawn and Rachel.  Their time in La Alpujarra is now down and they are nearly three months into their European adventure.  Tomorrow they are getting up and getting straight onto the road to return the rental care to Granada Airport and from there they are getting a bus to the north and moving onto their next location where they will be for almost two weeks before figuring out how to get to Montepelier, France where they will be for almost a month, I believe.  They are now working each place that they go with WorkAway instead of couch surfing everywhere that they go.

It was late when we finally turned in.  This past weekend was quite the adventure, but now it is over.  With Shawn and Rachel gone we are going into our final week in Spain ourselves.  Tonight, when we went to bed, is almost exactly the one week mark to our time leaving Spain.  We leave late on Monday night, a week from tonight, to head to Malaga airport so that we can fly out in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to go to Norway.

It is very sad to think of our time in Spain coming to an end.  We have all really loved it here.  Shawn and Rachel will actually still be in Spain about one week after we have left.  But all of us are wrapping up our time on the Iberian Peninsula for now.