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Family Christmas in Spain
Posted by Squiffy on December 29th, 2007
I’d been looking forward to Dec 21st for a long time – it was the day my family arrived in Spain for Christmas and I was so excited. I did a big food shop in the morning, a total of 4 hours in 4 supermarkets (I’ve never hosted Xmas before and had the added handicap of doing it all in a foreign language), and then went to meet them at the airport in the afternoon. Wow, airports are emotional places at Christmas time! After waiting an hour for them they finally walked through the security doors, and we piled Helen, mum and dad into Yoko, after lots of hugs of course.
We were lucky with the weather, and although there can be a cold wind here, it was sunny most of the time. In the days before Christmas we managed to squeeze in lots: eating tapas, drinking cava in the local wine bar, walks along the prom, shopping trips to a couple of markets and a drive through the deserted mining hills to a bustling town with a lighthouse.
On Christmas Eve we drove to Cartagena, our nearest proper town, and explored the Roman ruins, drank coffee by the harbour and browsed the high street. It felt very different to Christmas Eve at home, mostly because of the weather and because the town was not as busy as town centres would be at home. Dave cooked us a lovely Spag Bol for tea, we played some board games and then went to bed and waited for Santa to arrive…
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Los Alcazares: Friendly visitors
Posted by Squiffy on December 28th, 2007
Never one to turn down an offer to go on holiday, my good friend Liz responded to my please-come-and-visit-us e-mail with the words ‘you don’t need to ask twice’ and promptly booked herself and boyfriend Mark onto flights to visit us in December.
Their holiday wish list included eating tapas and seafood, so we whisked them off to our local tapas bar and amused the locals by ordering about 4 dishes each and devouring them in under an hour. Apparently not the done thing in terms of quantity or timing, but no-one seemed to mind.
Whilst some of the weekend was rainy, the sun made an appearance on a couple of occasions, giving us time to browse the local ‘tat’ market, eat lunch by the beach and take a boat trip across the Mar Menor to La Manga. Our only disappointment, other than the on/off weather, was our first taste of churros and chocolate. Everyone raves about this national dish which apparently can be likened to ‘Choc Dips’. However, what we got was a revolting combination of batter to dip in watery hot chocolate – I’m not convinced this is what we were after! We ate a piece each and left the rest to Dave, who can’t see anything go to waste!
To Mark and Liz – thanks for coming, it was great to see you.
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Cartagena: Thanks to Paprika and Rob
Posted by Squiffy on December 20th, 2007
At the Sailing Association of Mar Menor meeting we met Rob, an English guy who sold up everything in the UK, bought a yacht named ‘Paprika’ and sailed her down to Spain. Paprika is now based in Cartagena, the closest city to Los Alcazares, and Rob kindly offered to take us out sailing for the day on her, knowing how much I wanted to get out on the water. It was a really sunny, hot day and, because the wind was low, we had a very relaxing sail. We spent the day enjoying the views, spotting jumping fish and teaching Dave which rope to pull when. It was good to get a different view of the coast line, from the sea rather than the shore, and Rob pointed out some ‘illegal’ villages tucked away in the hills, which had been built without permission. Once safely back in the marina, without the usual panic that goes with berthing a yacht, we sipped coffee from a trendy bar overlooking the harbour and watched the sun set.
Bring on more days like that please.
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Broken comments NOT fixed
Posted by daveb on December 19th, 2007
In direct contrast to my recent entry, the comments facility on this blog is still not working properly. You may have tried to leave a comment recently: Whilst the comment that you enter is recorded ok, the ‘loading page’ image in your browser never stops ‘spinning’.
Two of the, erm, greatest IT minds are working on the fault — albeit it’s somewhat difficult to troubleshoot without a web connection, so please bear with us!
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Andalucia: Troglodytes
Posted by Squiffy on December 19th, 2007
Following our little tour around the lakes, it was time to drive the 400km back to our flat. With no time to plan or research this trip, we had no idea what sights or experiences we’d encounter on the long journey home. So we were pleasantly surprised when our route took us past the Sierra Nevada mountain range, giving us great views of the snow-capped peaks.
More oddly, we stumbled upon a large troglodyte village in the middle of no-where. The village has around 2000 residents, half of whom still live in caves built into the mountains. Some of the homes are quite well hidden, marked only by a small door or a chimney stack, whilst others look like houses from the front but you soon realise they disappear into the rock.
One cave dwelling is open for the public to look around, and shows how they are decorated now and how they would have looked in the past. The owner of this house/museum invited us to help ‘dig’ their extension using a pick axe! From what we could make out, it seems they use the clay that is removed to make pottery, as there were lots of shops selling locally made ceramics. We found this detour very amusing and interesting, proving you never know what’s around the corner when you’re travelling!
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Andalucia: The Lake District
Posted by daveb on December 18th, 2007
You might recall that Squiffy & I started off our travels in the UK. The [British] Lake District was somewhere that I was (still am) looking forward to seeing. Unfortunately at the time the rain stopped play and we headed south to find some sun.
So when I opened our Back Roads of Southern Spain guidebook and found a chapter entitled “Malaga’s Lake District”, I was convinced that this was the route for us. Heading north from Malaga city, we were soon steering our hire-car through some twisty mountain roads — stark difference driving a small, modern car through Anadalucian mountains compared to our twenty-five year old camper van over the Gotthardpass in Switzerland!
I’m all about the view and there’s a lot of them here. Mountains, lakes, rocks and little villages. The scenery here reminded both SQ & I of some of the more barren desert-states of America; like Arizona, for example.
The place was dead quiet and we enjoyed the temporary isolation of it all; we probably passed less than ten cars coming the opposite way in 100 km!
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Malaga: Rocks!
Posted by daveb on December 17th, 2007
Following the Irish wedding in Cork, we couldn’t get a direct flight back to the Spanish airport nearest to our apartment in Los Alcazares, Mar Menor. Instead we had to fly to Malaga, which is on the south coast of Spain and about a five hour drive from our ‘home’. Rather than attempt to mad-dash drive through the night to get back home, we decided to instead spend a few days exploring this area of Andalucia in a more leisurely manner.
I had my preconceptions about what Malaga would be like — an airport city that you only stayed at immediately before or after a flight. We had originally only booked the hotel for a single night, with the intention of driving on it the morning.
I’m happy to tell you that this was a mistake that we soon rectified — and stayed another night. Malaga is a beautiful city: A smart high-street, numerous beaches, cosmopolitan bars and restaurants and plenty of quaint little streets and alleyways to idle through. A deserving mention also goes to our hotel, the Ibis Centro hotel, which is easily the best ‘affordable’ hotel that I’ve experienced and brilliantly situated for the city centre, in terms of location, facilities, cleanliness and price.
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Broken comments now fixed.
Posted by daveb on December 14th, 2007
Quite a few people have reported to us the problems they with leaving comments on this blog.
I’m really sorry for the frustration that it caused you. Hopefully, I’ve fixed the problem now — so please do try leaving us a comment (and let me know if you still get problems).
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Cork: An Irish wedding
Posted by daveb on December 13th, 2007
The big day for Ben and Aileen has arrived! I’m happy to report that the bride turned-up at the church, albeit nearly half-an-hour late and, aside from getting absolutely drenched by a rainstorm during the beach photo-shoot, all went really well.
I gave the “big speech” that I (and a couple of silent co-writers — thanks to them) had been working on for the best part of a month and I’m very pleased to tell you that it was really well received. I can hardly remember standing up and speaking at all! (Must have been the nerves.)
The wedding reception continued well into the night, in fact I learnt that some folks had been up all night and still up drinking at 8am the next day…!
SQ and I packed our bags and drove through the constant rain back to Cork airport to take us back to sunny Spain.
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Cork: Pre-wedding arrangements
Posted by daveb on December 12th, 2007
SQ & I are running around like idiots this week; we’ve found ourselves in four countries in seven days: Spain, England, Wales and now Ireland.
My long-term friend, Ben, is marrying his long-term girlfriend, Aileen. They’ve recently moved from London to Cork, where Aileen originates, to set up a new life for themselves. It’s been a dream of theirs’ for such a long time and I’m so pleased that they’re now “living the dream”.
Ben has asked my to be his best man for his wedding, so we flew over a couple of days before the wedding to try on my suit, go through the church rehearsal and help-out where we otherwise can.
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