Sheep Guarding Llama

I got a great night’s sleep last night.  I was actually asleep before midnight, I think, and do not remember waking up even once all night long before I got up just after eight this morning.  I feel much better today.

It is still a bit on the chilly side this morning so I moved into the lounge and worked from there.  I got SGL updated and got to work on some video editing.  My first GoPro video from Spain is going to be uploaded this morning to YouTube.  I am very impressed by how good the GoPro looks.  That thing takes amazing video.

Dominica started to wake up at ten thirty.  She really needed the sleep.  Liesl got up at about the same time and came and asked me to take her to the market so that we could buy yoghurt.  She and her sister have been going through a lot of yoghurt every day.  We have bought two four packs every day that we have been here!  They love the no-preservatives yoghurt here.

I took the two girls to the market this morning.  They were very excited to get to go and thought that it was great fun.  They love that the market is right out our front door.  We bought bread and yoghurt and Luciana picked out some cookies to try.

Around noon we were finally ready to head down to Orgiva to do some shopping.  We are getting low on cash and we need that to do much of anything up here on the mountain so it was pretty important that we find some.  And we wanted to get some groceries beyond the small amount available at the little market next door.

The drive down the hill was the first time that we have seen the approach to Cáñar in daylight and Dominica was suitably impressed that we had done it in the dark.  The road is very windy and twisty and scary with big drop offs all over the place.  She agreed that the average American driver would be unable to navigate it given the requirement to do so in a stick shift vehicle.

It is not very far, maybe seven kilometres to Orgiva, but the drive make it take fifteen or twenty minutes.  It is a big of a stressful drive.  Driving in Orgiva itself is no picnic either.  Lots of “one way at a time” narrow streets, some with lights and some with “you just have to know when to go” driving.  Lots of people and dogs darting into the streets without warning.  No idea where you can park.  And, of course, we had no idea where we would find a grocery store or an ATM.

We drove nearly all of the way through town, which is not saying much as it is a very small and dense town, when we thought that we spotted a grocery store.  We also had to wait for someone pulling out of a parking space which was awesome because we were pretty sure that that meant that we would be allowed to park there. So I darted in and we lucked out that the store was a Dia, which is a major grocery chain in the area.

Grocery shopping was pretty easy.  We did not need all that much, just some basics and to let the kids pick out some things that they might want.  We probably spent no more than thirty minutes grocery shopping.  We got fruit, paper products, toddler wipes (you can’t buy those in Cáñar!), cereal, chips which Luciana requested and a few odds and ends.  It was most of a shopping cart and I was pretty shocked when the total turned out to be only forty four Euros (less than fifty dollars!)  That would have been closer to one hundred dollars in the States.  We were pretty happy about that.

There was no ATM in the grocery store, though.  That presented more of a challenge.  So we continued driving the way that we were until we left town and I had to pull a U-turn and drive back into town and go all the way through and out the other side still not having found an ATM or even a bank.  This worried us a little.

We drove into town again and tried going down what I would call “restaurant row”, a cobblestone street full of food venues and people everywhere.  Traffic was so heavy that we came to a complete stop for a couple of minutes almost instantly.  We spotted what we thought was an ATM so Dominica decided to just hop out and hope that I could make it back with the girls to pick her up.

The girls and I ended up driving all over the little, one-way side streets before eventually making it back past restaurant row and being able to pick Dominica up.  Thankfully there really were ATMs there and she was able to take out money and get back to the street and hop in as I went by, stuck in traffic again.  That worked out well, surprisingly.

From there we decided to just drive back up the mountain to Cáñar.  On the way up we stopped at a scenic overlook to take a few pics and ended up having a herd of goats come down the mountain to right where we were!  It was really cool to see traditional goat herding right there in our village.  The girls really enjoyed that.  I got a great picture of Luciana posing in front of the goats and one of Liesl posing in front of Orgiva.

We got home from Orgiva and opened up the house.  Dominica is feeling much better today and the cool air is not bothering her.  It was in the fifties today and no snow or high winds.  She even did laundry this morning and had the clothes hanging out on the line to dry as everyone does here.  We moved the kitchen table out to the lower terrace so that we could eat and relax outside which was really nice.

We spent nearly the entire day sitting out on the lower terrace enjoying the weather.  I took my laptop out and worked from there which was awesome.  I look forward to being outside a lot at this point.  The weather is supposed to be much better tomorrow, too.

Dominica and I snacked on break and cheese in the afternoon.  We also made a batch of fish fingers which the girls both loved and devoured!  At one point Liesl and I ran to the market and got another huge wedge of the local cheese and some cookies that she wanted.  The cheese would have been easily thirty dollars or more in the States, it was only four Euro here in Spain!  Everything is so much more affordable.

Dominica decided that she did not want to go out for dinner tonight so she attempted to use everything that we had in the house that was getting old and was not going to last much longer.  She made a big thing of amazing, fresh bruchetta and a large thing of poor man’s potatoes which is a local favourite.

I worked outside until it was very dark and cold.  Then, when dinner was ready, we ate in the kitchen and closed up the house.  The day with sunlight was nice but by the time it was late, around eight this evening, it was too cold to stay out there.  After we ate we retired to the lounge with the heater on low.

The girls spent pretty much the entire day playing on their own in the lounge.  They are great at entertaining themselves here.  They love that the house is so open.  They often talk to people outside the windows.  They don’t know how to say much but they know to say “Hola” to people outside and everyone always says “Hola” to them as well.

The girls are continuing to do really well with trying new foods and actually eating what we have.  We were really worried because this has completely disrupted their eating patterns.

The girls went to bed at midnight tonight and Dominica just a little while later. I stayed up until two thirty getting some posting done and getting the SGL blog caught up and attempting to get the last of the day’s media posted to YouTube.

We found out this morning why the posting is taking so long, the Internet access here, which is a stationary WiMAX connection down to Orgiva, is only 300Kb/s upload speed!  That is horrible.  So we are actively working on getting that speed increased.  Hopefully getting it at least to 600Kb/s will be no problem.  Much faster than that is unlikely, though.  We can only get 128Kb/s on our cell phones.  The signal is as solid and strong as can be, but there is no 4G service here so going to a better plan would not help us at all.  So we are stuck using the solid, slow, free service that we have.  At least it is free and reliable.

Tomorrow is Friday.  We are hopeful that we can do something this weekend although we have no idea what it is that we might want to do.  If nothing else we will probably take a drive around the area at least on Saturday.  And I am hoping that we can try out a different place for tapas tomorrow night too.  We’ve only eaten out once so far in our entire time that we have been in Spain!  How crazy is that?  Today is our fourth day in the country and we did not eat at all on our first day (except for train station food in Madrid, which doesn’t really count) and our second day we had just that one meal out and since then we have eaten at home.

We were talking today about how odd it feels being here and trying to keep in mind that we live here and are not vacationing here.  We have this kind of nagging feeling that we need to be somewhere to doing something like seeing a sight or whatever.  But just being at home, doing normal things is what we are here to do.  We need to just get used to doing normal things and actually living in Spain.

I got myself up this morning at a quarter till seven so that I could go for a walk and see the sunrise in Cañar.  I did not sleep all that great last night, I was very restless.  But that probably means that I am no longer so exhausted that I cannot stay awake.

I got dressed and did a little walking around town.  Not a long walk.  I went down to the playground where the girls played yesterday and checked that out.  The view from there is nice.  There were some older folks out and about in town.  Mostly just hanging out on one of the streets.  Probably a lot of people just gather in the mornings to visit.

The valley below us and the mountain beyond are just gorgeous any time of day.  So amazing to get to see it.  It was very cold this morning, just about forty degrees when I went out.  I did not stay out for very long.  I did do a little walking of some streets that I have not been on yet and figured out where the other bar in town is.  Maybe we will get to try that one out tonight or tomorrow.  Dominica plans to start cooking soon but we will have to see if we manage to go shopping and what we are able to procure.  Not having an ATM in town, as far as we know, is very limiting.  There is no means of getting cash or doing banking.  I have no idea how the local deal with money unless they are leaving town all of the time to do so.  We are pretty sure that a lot of the locals never leave.

Dominica was awake when I got back shortly after seven.  We hung out for a while.  We made coffee and went up to the terrace but it was too cold for Dominica, she needed to come back into the house after a few minutes.  She decided that she needed to hang out in the lounge which was very warm instead of even the kitchen.  For me, the kitchen was a much better temperature.

We heard the bread delivery van come so Dominica and I went out to the market and picked up some simple supplies.  More bread, yoghurt, frozen cheese pizzas, local cheese, fish fingers and such.  Nothing extravagant.  We are trying hard to find food that the girls will eat.  It seems to be working, they have been trying lots of new food and mostly liking it.  Getting them to try things is hard, but they like them as soon as they try them.

After hitting the market, Dominica went to the lounge and worked on her Rosetta Stone Spanish class for an hour.  She is trying hard to spend an hour a day working on it.  This is her second day.  After that she fell asleep for a while.  She has been very tired.

I worked on getting SGL updated with everything up to this morning and even started working on today’s post.  Writing is a major part of what I am going to be doing while here so very important that I keep up with it.

Liesl got up just after eleven thirty this morning, Dominica was still asleep.  Luciana got up just ten minutes later.

Dominica ended up sleeping well into the afternoon and then, even after she was awake, she spent the rest of the day in the lounge where the heat was on, wrapped in a blanket on the couch reading.  She is getting hit very hard by jetlag and can’t keep herself warm or get enough rest.

We had the power go out two or three times today.  Never for long, just a minute here or there.  We almost wouldn’t notice if the Internet connection didn’t go out when that happened.  And if we were using the 3G on our mobile phones then we probably would not even notice that.  Using all natural light and having windows just everywhere makes it easy to not use electricity.  We have no television on today, not even for a minute.  Only appliances that we really used all day were the hot water heater and the oven, both of which are pretty transparent to short power outages.

We decided that today would just be a “hang around the house” day.  We needed some time to catch up on things.  Rest, primarily.

We had a but of Internet issues today which we are working on.  I had to contact the ISP down in Orgiva to have them look into the issues.  Hoping to get that corrected soon as it is making doing anything here rather difficult.  Downloading software, working on the corporate VPN, uploading pictures and videos are all struggling quite a lot.

Possibly related to the Internet issues today, this afternoon we suddenly got some extreme winds.  I mean really extreme winds.  And for about an hour, even though the air temperature was in the low fifties registered in Orgiva and probably very high forties here since we had the windows open still – we got snow!  Apparently snow blowing off of the high mountains around us.

By late in the hour the snow got really strong.  I went to the window on the landing to take a video of it and caught Luciana in the background discovering that it was snowing and snowing way into the house.  The snow was blowing off of the plaza through the window I was standing in and making it halfway through the kitchen!  That was very surprising.

I worked all evening, first from the kitchen, then from the guest bedroom and then from the warmth of the lounge.  I actually had a very productive day at work today and felt really good about it.  I ended up working until nearly midnight even though I had signed on around eight in the morning.

It was eleven when Dominica went to bed and still before midnight when I did.  It was a mostly quiet day today.  It looks like we will be driving down to Orgiva in the morning and maybe exploring the region a little bit.  We will have to see when everyone gets up and what the weather ends up being like.  In theory we are going to be well over sixty degrees tomorrow which will be a nice change.  It has been a bit too cold since we arrived.

We are finally living in Spain!!  It is so hard to believe.  This morning (well, really this afternoon) we awoke in Cañar, Andalucia, España and this is where we live.  We really cannot believe it.

It was just after noon when we woke up.  We were so tired last night, we just slept and slept.  We really needed that.

We started today by exploring the house now that there is light.  We figured out how to make coffee and how to get up to the terrace which was breathtaking.  There is a door from the kitchen that leads to metal stairs that takes you up to the terrace which is on top of the kitchen.  The views are just amazing.  We can see the entire valley with Orgiva from there plus we have views of the mountain behind us, the village, the plaza and most of the region with only our view to the west being obscured.  We took a lot of pictures while we were up there.

Dominica made bread with butter for the girls.  They are both very excited to be here.  They love the house.  Liesl is just bubbling with excitement.

I went to the market at one to see what they have.  The market is right next door to us, just step out the front door and go in the door directly to our right.  So easy.

The market is tiny, just one room with shelves on the walls and a single freezer in the middle of the floor.  The whole place is only maybe twice the size of our lounge in our house.  I was able to find the basics.  I got yoghurt in sweet and strawberry flavours, mayonaisse, fresh bread, two frozen cheese pizzas and chocolate milk!  It was a good haul of food.  And cheap too.

The market closed for siesta at one thirty.  Something to get used to.  You really have to get up and get shopping if you want to have any food.

We mostly relaxed in the middle of the afternoon.  I did some work, we did some setup around the house, the girls played all over the place.  They played in the kitchen some and they set up with a movie on DVD on the television in the lounge and played with their toys in there.  They were very happy.

Dominica tried taking a shower today and had a very rough time of it.  She is not good at the finesse necessary to use a small, curtain enclosed European shower.  She had the pressure too high and it blew out the curtain and she kept turning the water off by accident when she would turn around.  She made a bit of a water mess in the bathroom.

Around five we went out for a walk to explore town for a bit.  I walked Dominica and the girls around to the places that I had found while dealing with the car last night.  Dominica did not even know where the car was since I had to go park it on my own.  I showed her where the bar was that I wanted to try tonight, where the kids’ playground was and then we hiked up to the top of town where there were some amazing views and a little stream that runs down into town.  It was good exercise walking up there.

I had to get back to the house at six as that is when the day starts in California and I have my “morning” meeting.  While I was doing that Dominica took the girls to the playground for twenty or thirty minutes.  They had a lot of fun and came back and told me all about it.

Luciana asked to take a bath this evening.  There is a bath tub as well as a shower here so she was able to take a normal bath and that kept her happy.  If I owned this house the first thing that I would do would be to remove both and replace them with a single, nice shower and bath combo unit, more like we have in the States.  There is room to do it and it would make the whole house so much nicer.  A relatively minor construction project that would take the house from generally quirky and slight difficult to manage to modern and super comfortable and convenient.  I would actually open up the bathroom a little too making it just a few inches more spacious while adding functionality.  I can’t imagine that people want to shower and take a bath with two people at the same time as it is, so not sure if there would be any negative at all to the project.

The kitchen in the house is awesome.  They completely redid the kitchen and it is completely modern with brand new everything.  What is really awesome, though, is that everything is done in a very old, classic 1950s European style so it looks like a brand new kitchen from sixty or seventy years ago.  There is a fridge, freezer and even a dishwasher all hidden behind old fashioned looking facades.  All of the drawers and cupboards look old but have modern fittings and have the “soft touch to close” feature that is popular now in many American kitchens.

My second update to the house would be running Ethernet, obviously, to major rooms and getting more wireless access points, including an outdoor one up on the terrace that would let me use my WiFi anywhere outside and even out in the plaza. That would be super easy to do.

Other than those minor changes, the house is really awesome.  We could totally live long term in a house like this.

I worked for a few more hours and then around eight thirty I took a shower while Dominica got the girls ready and at just past nine we went to the Menos Rural Los Ángeles Bar just a few doors on from us.  The girls asked if we had to drive somewhere for dinner.  They were pretty surprised when we didn’t even walk halfway to the car.

It was a bit of a challenge ordering dinner.  We had been expecting a normal tapas bar which would have been a bit more straightforward.  This was not.  We got menus which had no tapas and there was only us eating and two guys sitting at the bar.  Not quite what we were expecting.

We ordered two raciones, one tortilla españa and one plato de queso and we ordered two glasses of wine, we though.  Wine, however, was not by the glass but by the bottle.  This confused us, partially because we had assumed that the prices in the menu were glasses and partially because nothing was explained.  When a full bottle of wine arrived we were pretty afraid that we had ordered incorrectly and that we were getting a bottle of wine that was priced at ten Euros per glass!  This could have easily gone from a small evening out to a hundred dollar dinner.  That was a little scary.

The wine was excellent, a local rioja.  After a little bit they brought out a large plat for ensalada rusa, one of our favourite southern European foods.  It was delicious.  We could not convince either of the girls to try it, however.  They were content just colouring for a while.

Then out came our large orders of local sliced cheese with bread (queso con pan) and our Spanish style tortilla (tortilla Española) both of which were excellent.  We really enjoyed all of the food and the wine.  And it was great views down over Orgiva.  We are loving the local cuisine.

The moment of truth came when I asked for the bill.  We were really worried that it was going to be at least eighty Euros and more than we had cash on hand to cover.  But the total ended up being just twenty five Euros total!!  We were so relieved.  Not just because we had plenty of money for that, but also that eating in town is going to be cheap.  The ensalada rusa was the traditional free tapas that comes when you buy wine here.  So while not nearly as cheap as we have heard that tapas can be, we got an excellent bottle of wine (a full bottle!) plus a tapas (or more, that seemed like maybe it was a racion) with it for ten Euros.  That’s very cheap.

What we got was more than enough wine for the two of us, Dominica was tipsy from her portion, and enough food for the four of us!  Not bad at all.  We can go out to eat all that we want with it being that cheap.  Might not normally get a full bottle of wine, though, that is a bit excessive.  Maybe the other bar in town has wine by the glass.  Next time we come here we might try the local beer instead.  it is made in Granada.

We walked home and the girls played for a while.  It was probably ten thirty when we got back.  I spent much of the evening working on getting pictures uploaded to Flickr. We are having a lot of struggles getting things to post.  Our Internet has been mostly solid, although the DNS failed this morning but once we figured out to switch to Google’s DNS servers everything has been fine.  I have lots of pictures taken with the Nikon AW100 that we have with us that I wanted to get posted tonight before going to bed and I wanted to be pretty much caught up with SGL updates too before turning in.  It is hard enough to keep up with us even if all of our media channels are updated.  So I am making that a priority.

It was about one in the morning when I got to bed, but all of our current pictures have posted at this point.  Took probably sixty or seventy pictures today and two videos that are up on YouTube.  We might have the Internet speed increased soon, this is pretty tough to deal with.

With needing to sleep in so late today was a very short day for us.  But after our first real day in Cañar we are both so excited.  All four of us love it here.  We love the house that we are renting and we love the village and the views and the region is just amazing.  This was a truly remarkable choice for our first time really living in Europe and while there were and will continue to be struggles this was a great choice for not having an unbearable number of factors to contend with.  Most things have been pretty easy to deal with.

We are extremely happy with our decision to come here.  This is turning out really well.

Dominica was up and showering around three thirty.  I managed to not get out of bed until pretty much four.  Everything was already packed and ready to go so it was just a matter of getting dressed and running out the door.  We were all still completely exhausted after the last two days but at least we had some sleep.  The lack of sleep plus the exercise plus the jetlag really add up.

The walk back to the airport was not bad although it was up hill the whole way.  We were pretty warm and tired by the time that we got to the gate to enter the airport.  The girls were enjoying being pushed in strollers and not needing to have actually woken up to get to the airport this morning.

Checkin was not too bad today.  We got through the lines and were all set in about half an hour.  The walk through Dublin airport was really long, unnecessarily so, and I hate that they make you walk through a shopping mall instead of normal corridors.  On our long walk I ended up having all of our tickets fall out of my pockets which sucked just a little bit.  Dominica was more concerned than me.  I know that they will just reprint them.  I ran back through the airport and found only one of them.  It is what it is.

Our wait this morning was not all that long.  Maybe an hour before we were boarding.  The flight from Dublin to Madrid is just two hours and fifteen minutes.  Very nice and short.

Like before, the girls sat with me, this time with Liesl by the window and Luciana on the aisle.  Dominica sat across from us on her own with two teenagers.  The girls mostly slept again, so the flight was very easy and short.

Touching down in Madrid, it was raining, which is surprising considering how little rain Spain gets.  And it was very cold.  Around forty degrees!

We were very nervous that our luggage was not all going to make it, our whole flight had been so complex between coming from Orlando and dealing with the full day layover in Dublin and having to gate check the strollers.  But everything made it, no issues at all.

After getting all of our luggage back we had to figure out how to get to the Madrid Atoche train station in order to get the Renfe high speed train to Malaga on the southern coast.  We stopped and bought train tickets first.  We could have make the 12:35 train but felt that we were cutting it too close to gamble on so we got the 2:35 train instead so that we would have some time to kill and not be worried that we could not make it.

We tried to get a taxi but we were too many people with too much luggage to fit into a normal taxi – taxis are not minivans in Spain, they are rather small and we had problems fitting into a Mazda 3 when it was just us.  With a taxi you have a driver too!  So this was going to be a problem.  Luckily I was able to pull off a rather complex conversation with the taxi manager in Spanish and we got things figured out.  Dominica was very impressed as she had no idea what was going on the whole time.  We managed to get a larger taxi that we just fit into.  It ended up working out great.

We got to Atoche and spent some time looking for food.  With all of the luggage even little things like getting a sandwich turn into a painful, stressful affair.  We put in a lot of time trying to figure out food.  Then finally went through security and waiting there until the train arrived and we were able to board.

With Renfe high speed rail you get assigned seats.  We got three seats, because Luciana is free and does not get her own seat, at a table which was nice.  Loading onto the train was terrible though, it was packed and there was no room to board or put our luggage.  It was a huge effort and very hard to deal with.  But we got it done.

The train ride was at up to 300 kilometres per hour and stopped just once in Cordoba and goes from Madrid to Malaga in a bit under three hours.  A very nice trip with minimal stress.  The girls played the whole way as they had a table and could sit together.  It was a bit of an effort to keep them quiet.  Dominica managed to nap.

The ride went through some amazing countryside.  Many mountains and plains.  And we got to see two castles!  It rained the entire way.  I was happy that it stopped in Cordoba so that we at least got to see that briefly.  We got to see dozens of little white washed towns along the way.  They are amazing.  Open green countryside and mountains dotted with little white villages.  So cute.  And one of them is going to be ours for a time!

Once we arrived at the Malaga train station we had to find restrooms and that ended up being way more effort than it should have been.  It might have taken us as much as thirty minutes to find them!  What a pain.

We thought that we were going to have to take a taxi over to Malaga airport where our rental car was waiting for us but we lucked out and there was a local rail system that went right there.  So we just used that and it only cost a few Euros to get there and only took a few minutes.  It was great.

Once at the airport we had to walk a bit but getting the car, which we rented from FireFly, went really well.  We ended up getting an Opel Corso which worked out perfectly and all of our stuff fit!  We were so thankful.  We’ve been nervous about that for a full day now.

So this is showtime – two hours of driving, at night, in Andalucia in a new, five speed rental car in Spain.  I have never driven in Spain before and this is a new car and at night and we are exhausted.  Talk about adding a challenge to the end of a long trip!!

The drive out of Malaga ended up being really good.  I had to drive in first gear for a really, really long time in the airport which was a rather challenging introduction to a new car but it was fine.  Once we hit the streets the driving was pretty easy.  Navigation was a bit challenging as Dominica was not really prepared to be navigating around Malaga but I mostly knew what to do and we did not make any wrong turns.  We got out of town and onto the highway pretty easily.

Most of the drive along the Mediterranean coast was beautiful and pretty easy with a surprising amount of traffic on the highway.  No issues on the drive although we would have liked to have had a place to stop and get water or something but saw no such opportunity.

Once we turned north towards Orgiva the road immediately became narrow and began to hug a mountain range which meant mile after mile of tight turns and poor visibility and slow speeds.  It was long and stressful driving.

We eventually came to Orgiva, the large village at the base of our hill.  I had seen the lights from a little ways away of a larger village in a valley and a small town far up on a hill and joked to Dominica that that was probably what Orgiva and Cañar looked like and after a minute decided that that looked so much like how I felt that it should look that that must be it; and I was correct.

The entrance into Orgiva was over a narrow bridge over the river.  Driving through Orgiva was very challenging at night and without the GPS we would have been unable to find our way through.  The twists and turns were very confusing and just figuring out how the lights worked was quite difficult.

Once out of Orgiva we were onto the tiny road of twenty three switchbacks going high up the hillside.  That drive was extremely difficult, although nothing compared to our 2012 Italian Alps drive, and Dominica was suitably impressed by my driving prowess.  The Sierra Nevadas are a rather significant mountain range.

Once we got up the hill we had to figure out what to do with the car in town.  The streets are incredibly narrow and only a few of them can be driven down.  We drove in as far as we felt safe, then Dominica scouted on foot to figure out if I could safely drive into the square.  It turned out that I could so we drove into Plaza Santa Ana and parked the car by the fountain.

We met our direct next door neighbour an arrival.  He was hanging out by the fountain.  We introduced ourselves and asked him if he could help us to find out house.  He was unable to, however, so Dominica had to call our renters to figure out which house was ours.

We got into the house without much trouble.  The neighbour that keeps the keys came over and let us in and showed us how the keys work.  We quickly unloaded the car and got Luciana into the bathroom as she was having an emergency but did a great job holding it until we were into the house.

The village was very dark so we did not get to see very much of it but the bits that we did see were very cute and we are quite excited to be living here for the next season.  Orgiva was very beautiful too, what little of it we got to see as we drove through.

The house is amazing.  Three full floors inside and another full floor outside.  Dominica and my master suite is in the basement which stays relatively cool all year round as it is made of stone and underground.  It is a large suite with a good sized bed, television, couch, open space and an en suite half bath.  You access the basement by way of a circular stairway.

The main floor which is a few steps up from the plaza has the lounge which is a very good size, much larger than I had anticipated, with two couches a chair and the main television (a very small CRT with satellite.)  It also has the open center of the house where the house all comes together.  And the girls’ bedroom is there as well with two small beds in it.  They liked their room immediately.

Up the stairs from the main floor is the floor with the kitchen and fireplace, the main bathroom with shower and bath and what is to us the guest bedroom which has a full sized bed in it.  We have no use for that room unless people are visiting us so very handy should anyone do that – they have their own room on their own floor with the bathroom right next door.  We actually can handle several guests at once since there are two couches in the lounge plus room to sleep on the floor and the lounge has its own door so it remains private.  And the guest bedroom sleeps two.  We are shocked at how large the house actually is.

From the kitchen you can go out onto a kitchen level terrace which is a little bit like a dining room and overlooks the plaza towards the church.  There are stairs leading up to an enormous terrace on top of the kitchen, the fourth floor basically, that has a large table and set of chairs plus two lounge chairs for tanning.  We did not go up there tonight as it is late, for us, and we are just exhausted.  We just wanted to get in, get settled and get to bed.  Tomorrow we will explore the house.

We got onto the Internet and posted some quick updates.  The wifi in the house is okay, our mobile reception is excellent.  T-Mobile works fantastic everywhere in the house and around the area.  We are very thankful for that!

It was about nine o’clock when we got settled in.  Not very late, especially in Spain, but we were worn out.  Days of traveling and very little sleep is taking its toll on us all.

We got the girls to bed and went to bed ourselves.  By the time we had done everything it was actually just after midnight when we got off to sleep.  We did not even bother to shower, we were so tired.

The house is extremely cold.  There is no heat except for the kitchen fireplace and a local little electric radiator (very British) in the girls’ room and in the lounge.  So those rooms are a little bit warm, probably in the high sixties, but the bulk of the house is in the high forties!  Our bedroom in the basement is positively freezing.

The whole region has been extremely cold recently but the cold is supposed to be ending in a few days.  We should have about three days of very cold (fifties and below) and by late in the week we should be seeing high sixties and low seventies outside – more like the Spain that we expect.

The Catholic church is just two buildings away from us so we can clearly hear the bells ring every hour with the hour ring (number of bells to count out the hour) and then a single bell on the half.  No need for a watch in this town!

It was around ten this morning when our Aer Lingus flight touched down in Dublin, Ireland.  Both girls slept for the entire flight from Orlando so they were pretty well rested.  Dominica got a few hours and so was tired but not completely without rest like I was.  I was very exhausted.

We had no access to our luggage today because it is checked through to Madrid. So we were lacking simple things like our toothbrushes.  But we had our carry-ons so at least we had a few things.

Our bed and breakfast was located right near the airport so our plan was to walk today.  We actually did quite well walking from the airport to the bed and breakfast. It took maybe twenty minutes and was a gorgeous morning.  We were very excited to be in Ireland.  This adds a new country to the girls’ travel resume.  Liesl and Luciana have now been to eleven countries each (and neither have been to Canada) and Dominica and I are at thirteen each.

The bed and breakfast was great and ready for us as soon as we arrived.  We got right into our room and dropped stuff off.  The room was great with three beds and plenty of space for us.  Perfect for the four of us.  The whole place was very nice and the proprietor was very nice.

Once we were settled in it was nearly noon.  We were so exhausted and really wanted to go to see the city but after much discussion decided that we just could not handle doing the bus tour today that we had wanted to do.  We would be ill and falling asleep on it rather than enjoying it.

Instead we just walked to Kealy’s Public House which was practically next door and recommended by the bed and breakfast.  We got fish and chips for Dominica and me and pasta for Luciana.  Liesl shared fish with us.  She is on a fish kick ever since yesterday in EPCOT.  The food was great but we were so exhausted that we really could not enjoy it.

After the food and beer we were really dragging and were very happy that we had not attempted to go into the city proper.  We walked back to our guesthouse and Dominica and I went to bed while the girls stayed up and played for a while.

We managed to get a few hours of sleep.  That helped a bit.  Luciana climbed into bed with me which was nice but did not help me get much sleep.

I got up and showered.  That felt good.  Then we decided that we needed some supplies and I wanted a chance to get to see the area a little.  Would be awful to be in Ireland for the day and not get to see anything.

So around eight o’clock I set out to explore the area and see about finding some foodstuffs for the family.

I went for a walk of a few miles.  It took quite a long walk before I found anything that resembled a town or shops at all.  A very long way.  And it was quite cold out, maybe forty degrees.  I did not bring a jacket because I have learned that lesson over and over again – every time I take a jacket for a walk I end up sorry.  Better to freeze now than to overheat and sweat.

The walk was pretty boring but it was good exercise and gave me a chance to get to really see a little bit of Ireland up close.  Everyone was hungry so I just kept pushing on until I found something.

I finally made it to the far side of the neighbouring village to the south, on the way to Dublin proper, and after much walking finally found a local southern fried chicken take away (yeah, seriously), a McDonald’s (the only restaurant with customers) and a gas station with a very tiny mini-mart in it.  I stopped at all three.

The little market was pretty lean as for selection but I got a few local candy bars, some Pringles for the girls and some biscuits.  Then I stopped at the McDonald’s as I was far from the take away and unsure that they would still be open or have a single thing that we could eat.  So I got simple American food, sadly, but it was the only thing open in the town proper and where everyone local was eating.  So while not “local” in one sense, it was the very local place to be eating nonetheless.  An odd paradox.  The one thing that was really cool was that they had genuine Cadbury Creme Egg McFlurries!  So you know that I had to try one of those.  And, of course, the French fries in Ireland are vegetarian unlike the ones in the US.

On the walk back I stopped at the take away place and found a veggie burger, fries and onion rings for Dominica and the girls.  While I was there I ran into a couple of guys from Poland who were really interested that I was from the US and they talked with me while I waiting for me food and then walked quite a ways with me to discuss travel, moving, cultural differences, Ireland, etc.  We had a nice time.  You are so much more likely to run into people who want to talk in Europe than in the US.  Americans are so standoffish when it comes to meeting people.  American culture is very cold and reserved.  Europe is so much more open and communicative.

The walk back was much warmer than the walk there, which was pretty surprising as it was now after ten at night.  It was a long walk back and I was rushing to try to get back with the food before the food got too cold.

According to my iPhone health meter I did even more walking today than we did yesterday with all of the walking in Walt Disney World.  No wonder I have a monster blister on the bottom of my right foot.  I did nearly ten miles today and over nine miles yesterday.  Almost 20,000 steps today!

I am glad that I did the walk, even with the blister and the cold.  It was great exercise, a great change to see some of Ireland and I ended up talking to at least half a dozen locals which was fun and informative.  It was a very good use of my very limited time in the Dublin area.

Once Dominica ate we got the kids to bed and got to bed ourselves.  If we are lucky we will pull off four hours of sleep before we have to be up tomorrow.  Alarm is set for three thirty!!  We need to start walking back to the airport at four in the morning so that there will be time to get through security and get to our gate after doing the walk.  A very short night for us.