Sheep Guarding Llama

Got a chance this morning to play more Tropico 4.  Nice to have a little bit of a break.  A different kind of morning.  This coming week is going to be so busy that having a bit today to just have as downtime is very nice.

This coming weekend we are getting ready for Ryan to come visit us on Monday.  And then, on Monday, I have to work and go to the airport to get him.  He is visiting us, and then, the surprise business happens right after that.

Today (I think it was today) Rachel contacted me that they were in Belgium and needed to be rescued.  They had plans of being in Europe for most of the year with a scheduled flight out from Bavaria in October but they had not looked into visa requirements or considered how long they would be allowed to stay in Europe and had completely misjudged how the visas worked.  So to avoid issues in the Schengen area they had stayed for a couple of months in very expensive England and Wales burning through their financial resources many times faster than they had intended to do.

Finally they made it to France a few days ago and were keeping us abreast of their progress.  They were looking at coming down to Spain at that time but were between Calais and Dunkirk where there was no hope of transportation whatsoever.  They worked their way up to Brugge in Belgium where we started our own European trek in 2012. After a few days there they got to Rotterdam in The Netherlands.

At this point they have realized that northern Europe is extremely expensive and very cold.  Considering that they are wild camping much of the time and are drained of financial resources this is a very bad combination.  They are freezing and in a bit of trouble.  They had attempting to line up a farm to work on for a while in exchange for room and board but after getting it nearly lined up the farm stopped responding and they now have nowhere to go.

So, we spent much of the day frantically trying to figure out how to get them down to Andalucia where life is warm and cheap.  We finally figured out how to fly them into Malaga coming out of Amsterdam and to get them in on Wednesday morning so that they would land an hour before Ryan had to leave so that we can minimize trips out to Malaga as that is a two hour drive in each direction.

That was a very busy day.   And now we have house guests scheduled to be with us the entire remaining duration of our time in Spain this spring.  That is going to make for a very different experience here after this weekend.

Last night I installed Steam on my Mac so that I could see if there were any games that would work on it and to see if the Mac had enough power to run any of them.  The Mac is so slow, even being the top of the line with all the bells and whistles, that it often struggles with putting typed text onto the screen so I was concerned that it would not be able to run any games or anything requiring more power but it actually did alright with it.

The game that I downloaded to try out was Tropico 4.  Back in the U.S. when I had a Windows desktop I had been playing Tropico 3, which I liked a lot, but it was just about all that my desktop could do to keep up with it.  My desktop is very old.  But Tropico 3 will not run on a Mac, but Tropico 4 will (I own the entire set of the first four Tropico games) so that is what I tried.  To my surprise it ran very well and looks great.  Very playable.

I played through the tutorial and first campaign this morning.  It is a fun game.  I missed it since we left the US.  Nice to have it back.

Work was very, very slow today.  I am the only engineer that is not at an offsite meeting together for the rest of the week so I really have no one to interact with or anything.

We thought that Liesl was going to be okay today after getting a long night’s sleep but she said that her neck was still hurting her today, too.  That’s not good.  She did seem to be a little better, though.  Dominica had her do ABCMouse for school today for a few hours.  But Liesl basically spent the entire day in the guest bedroom laying down trying to feel better.

Because Liesl was not feeling well, we really had a pretty slow day.  Could not go anywhere.

In the early afternoon, Luciana came upstairs and casually said that her stomach did not feel very well.  But that was it, a casual comment as she walked by.  She did not act sick or complain or anything.  Just this really casual, in passing comment about her stomach.

Then, in the early evening, Luciana suddenly got sick while hanging out in the bed with Liesl.  It was pretty horrible.  All over the bed, the iPad that they had been using, all over herself, me when I ran to get her, the floor, the bathroom…. it was pretty bad.  Thankfully she did not act like it was too awful.  She didn’t act sick before it happened and the moment that it was over she said that she felt fine!  Talk about a trooper.

Luciana agreed to go lie down in the living room.  Dominica made her a bed there and Luciana was asleep in minutes.  We spent a lot of time cleaning up.  Dominica had to do an emergency, nighttime load of laundry.  We had to take a chance on putting the laundry out on the line at night as there was no way that it should wait until tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.

Dominica spent the evening in the living room watching over the slumbering Ciana.  She got a lot of sleep.  Impressive how easily she can sleep while sick.

We thought that maybe she was fine and that that was it once she slept for a long time and Dominica thought that maybe she could sleep in her own bed.  But just before it was bed time she threw up again – and tried to stay asleep!  She fought us when we tried to clean her up.  Talk about a heavy sleeper.

So Dominica slept on the same floor as Luciana.  Liesl slept down in the basement with me.  Liesl thought that that was great fun.

I fell asleep on the early side.  Liesl was up watching her iPad when I fell asleep.  I have no idea how late she was up.

Got up at seven this morning and spent much of the morning on the laptop up in the kitchen getting finally caught back up on SGL.  Lots of updates to get posted today.  Dominica got up around nine and Luciana shortly thereafter.  Liesl slept until the afternoon!

It is bright and sunny today, still chilly, and very windy.  Dominica was getting desperate to have a chance to do laundry so even with the high winds she decided that she had to take the opportunity and give it a try.  At least, in theory, the clothes will dry quickly with all of the wind.  Hopefully no rain comes, there are clouds that look a little ominous but mostly it looks like it will stay sunny.

We have more than one thousand pictures posted to Flickr now from our time in Spain.  I spent a lot of time this morning uploading images from my iPhone so that I could clear that down as it was storing a lot of pictures.  I am nearing twelve thousand pictures on my Flickr account.

Today was a very slow day for us.  We just stayed in and kept things very relaxed.

This afternoon, while just sitting at the kitchen table, Liesl did something and really hurt her neck.  It was very sudden.  She was fine and the next moment her neck was in real pain.  It seemed to just be muscle pain so we gave her Ibuprofen and hoped for the best.  We are guessing that a good night of sleep might be all that she needs.

We got to bed on the early side tonight.  After a while Liesl came downstairs after Luciana had fallen asleep and crawled into bed with us because she was having problems sleeping.  She fell right asleep.

Today is our last day in Córdoba.  Our awesome landlords did not make us check out this morning like we have had to have done everywhere else that we have stayed but were able to check out whenever we wanted.  So we stayed until mid-afternoon.

It rained last night, thankfully I heard it and got up and closed the windows so that it would not rain in on us.  Dominica and I loved our corner bedroom where we could have windows, very large ones that you can step out of onto the balcony, open on either side.  And they have cool double doors that allow you to block out the rain while still allowing a ton of air through.  These are really designed for the summer to insulate against the summer heat, Córdoba is the hottest city in all of Europe, after all, but work great for rain too.

It was cold and dreary this morning when we got up.  We wanted food and were afraid that it was going to rain again.  We loved the food at Casa Rubio so much that we went right back there again this morning.  We were unsure if they would be open as early as we wanted to go there to eat so Dominica sent me out to walk down there and see if it was open before we dragged Liesl out of bed and had the girls walk there.  They were open, so we got ready and went to lunch.

Lunch was awesome too.  We got the same potatoes that we had loved two nights ago and the aubergines too.  Liesl got the fish that they had liked.  Luciana tried “Choco Frito” which she has not had since we were in Barcelona in 2012 but she loved it then.  It is fried cuttlefish in the style that calamari is often done in the U.S.  She loved it, it is very similar to calamari so that worked out perfectly.  Everyone loved their food.  It started raining just a little bit while we sat outside having lunch.  We were all huddled under the umbrella.

After lunch we went to a local artisan ice cream parlour that we had found on our wanderings yesterday.  The ice cream was great and it started to pour while we were eating it.  So we stayed inside and got coffee to wait for it to die down a little.  It was really coming down.

Then we went back and packed up the apartment, it was raining but not heavily.  We left there at two thirty waiting for there to be a break in the rain that had started while we were eating.  Unfortunately we barely stepped outside before it started to pour again.  We stood under some trees trying to reduce how wet we were getting but we were pretty wet by the time that we got to the garage with the car.

Getting out of the city was pretty easy.  Instead of heading to one of the big roads, we took the N-432 to the south east out of town.  This turned out to be an excellent choice because the entire drive was very slow and casual with almost zero traffic and spectacular views of Andalucia.  It was a great drive and it was shorter in distance and better gas mileage than if we had taken the highway and only a few minutes longer.  It was a great choice.  We loved the drive.

We came through Granada and switched to the A44 that we normally use to get down to La Alpujarra.

After being away so much of the week we were all very happy to be back in our village and into our house where we could just relax.

We set up everyone in the living room and I got us “The Love Bug” and we had a family movie night!  This is the first time that Dominica or I have watched a show since before they all went to Disney World in the middle of March!  We have so completely adjusted to not having television or shows here that we really don’t even think about it at all.  There is always so much to do.

The girls loved “The Love Bug”.  They have never seen any of the Herbie movies before.  Liesl was especially happy that we had a family movie night.  I had to miss a lot of the movie as I had to make three pizzas for the family while we watched the movie.  THREE!  Talk about some hungry kids.  Each of the girls ate three quarters of a pizza on their own, or more.

After the movie was over we sent the girls off to bed.  Then Dominica and I watched the first episode of season three of “The Love Boat.”  Then it was off to bed for us too.  We were all pretty tired.