Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Monday.  Tonight Ryan is arriving from New York.  He left last night and spent most of today exploring Oslo, Norway.  He has an eight hour layover there and is walking the city and taking a boat tour of the local fjord.

I had to work early in the day so that I would be able to drive out to Malaga this evening.  Dominica spent the day doing a lot of cleaning too.  Thankfully she can clean for many hours after I leave as it is a four hour or more round trip to Malaga.

Ryan’s flight to Spain ended up getting delayed just a little so I really was able to easily put in a full day at the office and did not have to leave early or anything.  I didn’t work late but I didn’t quit early either.

It was just after eleven at night when I pulled out of Cáñar and started my drive towards Malaga.  I took the Órgiva route on the A346 to the A44 and down to Salobreña, where we were last evening, and west on the A7 / E15.  The drive is a very easy one and the same one that we did our very first night as we arrived in Spain, but in reverse.

I had to get gas to be able to make it to Malaga but all of the gas stations in La Alpujarra region were closed and there is nothing on our section of the A7.  I had to go quite a ways before finding something but thankfully once you get to the Costa del Sol there are twenty four hour gas stations regularly.

I managed to make it all of the way through Malaga without needing to use a GPS.  In fact the GPS was all wrong and would have taken me all kinds of wrong places.  Getting to the airport was pretty easy.  My timing was really good too as Ryan was just ready for me as I pulled in.

Ryan was pretty exhausted having been up for nearly thirty six hours when I picked him up.  He had spent this morning in Oslo taking a quick tour of the city.

It was nearly three when we got to the house and about four when everyone got to bed

We got up this “morning” and raced to get the whole family ready so that we could head down to the “big city” of Órgiva to do our shopping for the next week or two.  On the way out of town we discovered that there was a produce market set up right on the main street of Cáñar.  We had no idea that that happened on Sundays.  We realized to our astonishment that this was our first ever weekend spent here in our own village!  How crazy is that?

So we shopped at the produce market and sent Liesl and Luciana to the little playground to entertain themselves while we did the produce shopping.  We probably shopped for half of an hour and got to say good morning to lots of the locals.  The market is a great chance to get out and see everyone as this appears to be where everyone gets their produce.  The produce market is run out of the back of a van.  It is pretty funny.  The girls had a great time getting to go to the playground for so long and while they were there some local kids stopped by too so they got to meet a few kids.

Once we were done with our shopping – which included three large bags of groceries and came to about four and a half dollars (no really!!) we got into the car and drove down to Órgiva.

To our dismay, everything in Órgiva was closed.  We went to both groceries stores but no luck.  And basically every shop was closed.

We decided to get some food but the local parking lot was full.  We ended up in a different part of town than usual and found an amazing Moroccan restaurant that we had never seen before.  It was extremely hot out, nearly one hundred degrees when we stopped for lunch, but the girls insisted on sitting inside even though there was no air conditioning which made for a very warm lunch.

Lunch ended up being really amazing.  We have been looking for a change of culinary pace for a while.  Spain has great food but most food really is extremely similar with the standard Spanish fare and pizza being almost completely ubiquitous to a degree that we found quite surprising.  So this is a great find for us.  We were really excited and ordered way too much food, but it was all just amazing.

When we left lunch, which was probably two hours later, it was a full on one hundred degrees.  Too hot to do anything, especially as it was humid too.  We really needed groceries and it appears that everything here must close on Sundays.  We are only guessing it is the only thing that really makes sense.

So we decided to just hop in the car and drive to Salobreña on the Costa Tropical.  We were already partway there and they have two large supermarkets that are very likely to be open, even on a Sunday.

We were surprised by how little was going on in Salobreña when we got there.  But there was activity.

We hit the SuperSol supermarket instead of the Dia Maxi today because while the Dia looked rather like it was open its parking lot was completely devoid of cars and we did not want to go in right as they were closing or find that they had just closed or whatever.  So we got to explore a new grocery store.

On our way there the girls had spotted a bouncy house thing at a little street carnival that they begged and begged to be taken to see.  So we took a look to see how that was.  It wasn’t cheap, at nearly two euros per ride, but the times were long and they really wanted to do it.  So we spent about twelve Euros and they did that for at least half an hour.  Liesl specially liked riding a big carousel that had a lot of variety and Luciana really liked the bouncy house that had trampolines in it.

After the carnival we walked across the street to the city park which had an old, run down playground in it.  But it was rather busy.  We stayed for a while.

After the playground we drove down to see if there was any parking available near to the shore and there was actually quite a lot.  We parked right on the beach and walked to the water.  This is actually the first time that we have actually taken the girls to the sea since we got to Spain!  We have been to the water several times and seen the sea a lot and were on the ocean in Cádiz but have not been on to the Mediterranean yet.  So this was a nice and a surprise treat.

It was only eighty degrees down on the sea shore.  A very nice day for it.  We sat right by the water and all got our feet wet.  I taught the girls how to skip rocks.  Liesl actually did pretty well.  They had great fun.

The girls all stayed on the beach and I climbed a huge rock formation near them and got some amazing views of the beaches and could see way back to our village.  I climbed back down, got the camera and climbed back up again.

We stayed out until about nine in the evening and then drove back to the house and called it a day.  Tomorrow is going to be a long day for sure.  Work all day then driving to and from Malaga.  That’s four hours of driving after work is done.  And we plan to clean more tomorrow too since we lost all of our day today.  We had not planned on being away all day like we were but it did turn out to be a pretty fun outing.  So we had a nice day even though it was too hot to stay in our own village.

Two days until Ryan arrives here in Cáñar so we are cleaning, primarily, this weekend.  Lots of cleaning today, although it was tough as the weather is starting to get warm.  This is the warmest that it has been since we first got to Spain.  Which is not really all that bad since our first month here was a bit colder than we were really thinking that it was going to be.  Now things are getting to be a bit more like we thought that Spain would be like.

The cleaning went mostly well.  There is still a lot to be done.  And some things, like the laundry, cannot be rushed as we are limited by the clothes lines and how much we can dry at once.  To make that even more challenging the lines are old and rotted out and break regularly.  Dominica broke the one line several times today and now, instead of running between poles, we have one end tied off to a stack of chairs because that is the only thing that can hold any weight but can be moved to where the now shortened line can reach.

Overall a relaxing day.  We went nowhere and did nothing but cleaning and then watching some Love Boat this evening.

Tomorrow we are going to go grocery shopping down in Órgiva so that we are stocked up for all of the visitors.

Today is Friday and it is also our final week day alone at the house in Cáñar with it being just the four of us.  The house is going to be packed started on Monday.  The girls are a bit disappointed that they are going to be losing the “guest bedroom” as they love that room and have slept in there nearly every night since we moved to Spain.  They like it because it has good Internet access so their iPads work really well in there and they like that it has a double bed so that they can easily sleep together than than each having a twin on opposite sides of the room like they have on the ground floor bedroom.

It was mostly a quiet day.  This evening Dominica and I watched the start of the third season of The Love Boat which is silly but we love that show.

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.