This gastronomic experiment was actually yesterday but the post would’ve been too long so here it is on what would otherwise be a slow news day.

I always like looking at the seafood counters in Spanish (super)markets. The most interesting thing we’ve seen so far have been percebes [goose-necked barnacles], though I didn’t recognise them at the time. Neither did I know either how to cook them or, for that matter, how to eat them. That was in Valencia’s jaw-dropping covered market. I have since consulted YouTube for instructions.

On this trip I’ve been seeing some grey crustaceans called galeras in the local vernacular. They look a bit like a push-me-pull-you langoustine, or something along those lines. Here’s an individual that I think may help you understand my description. It’s about 10cms/4ins long, The front of this creature is actually the left hand end but they have two dark “eye spots” on the tail, presumably to scare off would be attackers, at the right hand end. If you look closely at the left hand end, you’ll make out the real eyes and the predatory limbs that give this creature its English vernacular name, Mantis Shrimp.

I didn’t actually have any recipes or tackling instructions for these critters either but they look sufficiently similar to prawns/langoustine for me to bite the bullet and have a go. I bought a bag full which, with the help of the nice lady on the seafood counter at Consum, turned out to be about 600g of the beasts. [They were 8€ per kg and the tail “eye-spots” show up better in this picture. Oh, they’re the other way around. 😀 ]

I’d no idea of any accepted way of cooking them but this was lunch and  the sun was out bathing our balcony in balmy warmth so I decided to go for an old standard where prawns might be concerned: a la plancha with garlic and parsley. My only concern was that the little beasties would curl up when thrown onto the heat making it difficult to keep enough of them in contact with heat source. It didn’t happen, though, to my surprise; they remained straight and flat so I could just flip them over a few times until I judged them to be cooked (another guessing game).

Now to let them cool a little before we tried to tackle them.

Lesson #1: they bite back. The shells are very spikey and you can get sore fingers.

Lesson #2: unlike langoustines, you can’t crack the underside of the tail by giving a gentle squeeze, no cracking occurs but you will get a sore thumb (see lesson #1).

Lesson 3: resort to mechanical assistance. We ended up using our kitchen scissors to split the underside of the tail, open them up and scrape out the meat, which was still generally difficult to extract.

Lesson #4: they are delicious. You can’t describe flavour so I won’t try too hard but they have a sweet intensity of flavour, sufficiently different to other crustaceans to make the lessons worthwhile. I think they were perhaps a little underdone, which is why the meat remained a bit difficult to extract.

Next time [Lesson #5 courtesy of YouTube], I’d boil them which provides an even, all round heat and would cook them better, hopefully releasing the meat more readily. Our use of scissors was an inspired correct approach: having topped and tailed the beasts, scissors are generally used to cut along either side of the tail before pealing off both upper and lower shell sections. [Ignoring the southeast Asian street food approach which simply chucks the chopped up entirety at you, shell and all.]

Oh, they are also called Pissing Shrimp, apparently, due to their habit of squirting a jet of water at you. Mind you, destined for the pan, who could blame them?

The first two weeks of this trip were plagued by floods, firstly a Gota Fria causing a raging torrent in the local river, secondly my nose continually dripping courtesy of an accursed cold that I imported from the UK and which lasted until beyond Xmas. The weather cleared up well before Xmas and I’ve just been waiting for me to clear up so we can get out and play in what we enjoy most, the countryside.

Today was just such a day. The sun shone, with a little high level haze drifting across, and the temperature was hovering around 15C, perfect for walking uphill. I needed to be a little wary of the old lungs, which were still suffering from lack of use due to the cold, so we chose to set off up to the cross on the hill behind Senija. It’s a good first leg stretch and there are often butterflies “hill-topping” at the summit.

We passed a merry band of Deutschers on the way up, just enough to practice a few rudimentary phrases in another language, and we were soon at the summit. I wasn’t disappointed, butterflies there were. In season this is a great place to see the magnificent Swallowtail (Papilio machaon) and Iberian Swallowtail (Iphiclides feisthamelii) butterflies. They weren’t here now but there were many small Blues flitting about. Regarding this as a post-cold training walk, lazy Franco had not brought his camera and wildlife lens with him but Francine saved the day and snagged a couple of critical shots, good enough to identify the Blues as Lang’s Short-tailed Blue (Leptotes pirithous); they are quite delightful. The Blues were accompanied by a number of Wall Browns who were not intent on posing for pictures. Good to see, though.

On the way down we found something much more familiar to folks in the UK, a Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta) was sunning itself on a wall as they are wont to do on sunny winter days in the UK, being one of our five species to over-winter as an adult. [Go ahead, try to name them.]

We spotted some interesting plants, too. After all, there has to be something around for nectar feeders flying at this time of year. Not that I think any butterfly could feed on the first of these, judging by the shape of it – a Friar’s Cowl (Arisarum vulgare). The second one that caught our eye looked a bit more promising; it’s a White Ramping-fumitory (Fumaria capreolata). [That’s easy for you to say. No it isn’t.] What a curious name, though.

The legs survived their first excursion of 2017. It was great to be out in the countryside studying it, too.

Flying into Alicante airport, that’s where we pick up our rental cars. Being at an airport, the rental offices are generally open and, with the volume of business, there are generally quite a few cars. One lesson I’ve learnt is to avoid the ever so nasty Fiat 500L. Actually, if you follow Franco’s rule, you’ll avoid absolutely anything Italian. Another automotive Italian disaster was the Lancia Ypsilon that we suffered, once. Less disastrous but not great was a Fiat Tipo. We have had a Skoda, which was adequate in an unscintillating way, and a brief foray into something French that I think was a Renault which, being a diesel, at least had some punch, albeit a little rough and ready,

This time, I thought we’d lucked out as we were handed the keys to a brand-spanking-new Ford Focus, in all its shiny black glory. Being utterly pristine, I bit the bullet and went for the full insurance. I climbed in and soon found pretty conventional controls to adjust the seat, steering column and mirrors. Joy of joys, you actually had to start it with the key. How terribly backward, Henry. 😉 Adjustments complete, we drove off, gingerly at first but with the growing confidence that convention brings.

I soon began to feel at home. It sounded a little gruff, however, and I began suspecting a 3-cylinder engine. It was spritely, though, and certainly didn’t labour when it came to inclines. Francine looked at our rental agreement. Yikes! This is only a 1-litre engine. This was one of Ford’s new EcoBoost jobs. It’s a petrol engine which, although of low capacity, pulled smoothly from ~1500 revs, more like a diesel than a petrol. It flew up hills and jumped forwards when I asked it too. I am not readily impressed but I loved it; it was a joy to drive.

It continued to be such a joy to drive that on New Year’s Day, I dropped my guard. I also dropped my right hand a little too much and smacked a kerb stone on the way into Benissa. We had been planning to head for Xabìa/Javéa but our plans were brought to an abrupt halt when the car began complaining of low tyre pressure. “Bother!”, I said, or words to that effect. There was a handy piece of rough ground onto which I pulled. Sure enough, a distressing hiss of escaping air and a rapidly deflating front near side tyre told all that was necessary; I’d done some real damage, probably unseated the tyre from the rim.

In the boot, mercifully, I found an emergency spare. I managed to get to grips with an unfamiliar jacking system and changed the wheel. We returned home to call the rental company.

New Year’s Day is not a great time to have a mechanical mishap. They confirmed that I was at least still mobile – spare wheel on car – and suggested that I present myself at their nearest facility the next day when life would begin returning to normal. Their nearest facility was in Benidorm. Arghh!

We’ve been studiously avoiding Benidorm, which is about 30 minutes south. Now, however, was an emergency and our elderly satnav found the rental office without too much trouble, short of trying to send me the wrong way down a one-way street. Parking was more problematic but we eventually worked out how to get into the underground garage area. We were told to dangle around for an hour while they tried to find me a suitable replacement vehicle. The term “try” did not inspire confidence and I had frightening visions of getting something Italian.

The offices were near the front so we spent our hour exploring. Here is how to get a feel for the reality that is Benidorm.

1. Imagine how  bad you THINK Benidorm is
2. Now double it.
3. OK, double it again [redouble, in Bridge-speak].

You’re getting the idea. I’ll let a few pictures do the describing for me.

The last of those pictures shows our view from our coffee table. Great, isn’t it?

Finally we returned and got our replacement car. Whilst I was mightily relieved that it was another Ford Focus, this was a conventional 1.6 litre petrol job with, I feel, a little less grunt that the 1-litre EcoBoost job. OK, I admit it, I’ve become a Ford convert.

Treating our replacement car with constant respect, we dawdled our way back to Jalón and celebrated with lunch out. Francine went for the squid rings and chips whilst I, feeling very gloomy about having been such a silly-billy, went for some comfort food in the form of a handmade burger, complete with bacon, tomato, and egg. We each had 2 glasses of rosado and a coffee to finish. Total bill, 21€. Ridiculous!

Now to see if we can get back to normality.

The waters in the Jalón River have continued to fall, though plenty of folks are still staring at it through their cameras. Added to that, yesterday and today have seen pretty much uninterrupted sunshine for the final festive preparations. Today was particularly pleasant with the mercury hitting 21°C on our balcony. I did take a snap but the reading doesn’t show up so content yourselves with a valley view minus cloud cover. There was nothing else for it, we just had to celebrate after all that grey with one of our favourite lunches: prawns with alioli [garlic mayo] and bread. Quite soon, I just had to go barefoot, too.

Francine was excited ‘cos she could now get some laundry done and peg it out to dry. I do understand how much of a headache the laundry can be when you have limited space and limited drying facilities. Things get a bit fraught towards the end of a week of poor weather.

With the waters low and the sun being out for a second day, I did wander down to the most dragonfly-friendly spots. I have seen little friends here as late as the 5rd January but, alas, this time I could find nothing. Tis part of Spain has had a very badly needed wet autumn so I suspect the season is already at a close. The same may not be true elsewhere, though.

So, onward to the festivities. I wish you a very good one. Call this a Xmas tree:

It felt as though it would never end but mercifully the biblical deluge afflicting this part of Spain first of all abated then finally ceased overnight. It was heartening to be able to see across the valley when we raised the persianas [window blinds] this morning. The sky still didn’t look very settled but it was a start.

Francine managed to grab a couple of phone camera shots of the state of the water on her morning shopping trip. Eventually the skies cleared a tad and the sun put in a welcome appearance, enough for me to feel like leaving my cold-induced prison to join her for some fresh air and a saunter beside the river to inspect the state of affairs.

The river looked about a metre or so lower than it had been in full spate.The video that I posted would have been shot roughly from the position of the yellow car on the left of this picture. The water was getting close to the top of the parapet wall. In New Testament times, the Jalón river is normally a sparsely scattered collection of ever dwindling pools with intervening dry, rocky river bed, so this still qualifies as a raging torrent. It clearly is an improvement on yesterday, though.

The flow of the water was still fast and powerful, making for some impressive sights along parts of the local reach. Here, for example, is a section that might have landscape photographers pausing reaching for their Lee Big Stoppers. [Francine’s was back at Casa Libélule.] A combination of vegetation clearance and flood changes the landscape sufficiently to make difficult precise location identification but I think this waterfall is where I spotted first spotted Orange-veined Dropwings (Trithemis kirbyi) basking on sunny poolside rocks; rocks that are now submerged. The flow demonstrated admirably how those pools are carved over time by the water’s flow, even though these sorts of flows are separated by several years, for the most part. It will be interesting to see what sort of effect this type of cleansing flood might have had on the dragonfly population. I have seen them here in late December and even early January but I imagine that will have to wait for next season, now.

A little further upstream, we found a bend or two where the river had clearly burst its banks. Here, some soil had been washed away from beneath small sections of tarmac road and concrete reinforcement, causing some sections of concrete and tarmac to fracture and collapse. Nothing too serious, though, everything still looked generally sound and passable.

That’s what the Spanish call it, anyway. We’ve heard of a gota fría before, though we didn’t know how to spell it. We’ve even seen a video of the Jalón river in spate as a result of a gota fría, complete with a car being swept away downstream.

Now we are having the pleasure of experiencing a gota fría of our own and, of course, learning how to spell it so we can talk about it. Gota fría translates literally as “cold drop”. It’s a particular meteorological phenomenon that affects this Mediterranean coastal region of Spain. Most of what drops is seemingly biblical amounts of water. If there were any Spaniards called Noah, they would be hammering boats together furiously and saving bottles of wine, two by two. There are Spaniards called Jesus [pronounced Hay-soos] who could make very good use of their walking on water trick, should they happen to know one. The steps beside our house were transformed into a water fall this morning.

We have now had about 36 hours of biblical rain and, much as I didn’t want to venture outside with my cold, I was reminded that a workman was supposed to be turning up to fit our security gate across the entrance door, a measure against the miscreant burglars. I braved it and ventured out to get money to pay him.

Once I’d figured out how to control the rental car’s demisting system, – don’t you just love getting to grips with strange vehicles? – I drove gently into town through vineyard soil being washed away across the roads. Driving over the bridge into town I saw the river looking just as it did in the video of paragraph #1 but without, mercifully, a car floating down it. I should point out that from this viewpoint, there would normally be absolutely no water visible. [Video courtesy of Jim Murdoch, a brave Scot who can stand outside in such conditions.]

Speed bumps make for an interesting problem in these conditions: with kerb stones on two sides and speed bumps acting like dams on the other two, paddling pools form in the intervening road section, the water having no ready escape route. Every road in town was awash as I found a parking space and paddled my way to the bank, being drenched in a matter of a few yards. A lady ahead of me at the hole-in-wall machine mimed swimming back up the street.

I can’t imagine that our workman will turn up to fit the gate (I hope he doesn’t)  but I’ve got the dosh … and a very wet pair of trousers.

News from Spain had been somewhat unsettling of late. Before we flew out yesterday, we received news of several burglaries in our development. There are six blocks, each consisting of five units. First we heard that two units in our block had been broken into. Not initially knowing which, we were on tenterhooks until discovering that ours had not been targeted. Then we heard that a third unit in our block had been breached but again, mercifully we escaped.

The next news was more heartening. We heard that the Guardia had stopped a suspicious vehicle and apprehended two men. We even had a photograph showing three police cars and the villains Next we learned that a camp of suspects “surrounded by TVs” had been discovered in neighbouring Alcalalí. A meeting with the Guardia has been arranged in the town hall on Monday, to which we have been invited, I suspect for the Guardia to trumpet their success.

This morning, Francine spotted one of our pairs of permanent residents wandering up the steps beneath our balconies. Francine greeted them. They greeted Francine with the news that two more units in another block had been broken into. The two units in question are immediately overlooked by that very pair of permanent residents, who think it must have happened either last night or, perhaps, yesterday evening under the cover of people watching TV.

Now we really are wondering whether the chap Francine spotted shortly after we arrived really was one of the culprits.

As luck would have it, our local locksmith arrived at our neighbouring unit to fit a concertina security gate across the entrance door. Since our spate of burglaries, his business has been brisk – he’s in the process of fitting 20 or so gates in 30 properties. He’s the nice man who rescued us from the embarrassment of locking ourselves on our balcony. I popped out to say hello and ask if he’d heard about last night’s attacks. His eyebrows shot up, which I took as a no. We went down together to inspect the damage. The pattern was familiar. The door of one unit had been jemmied open while in the other unit, which had a security gate across the entrance door, the metal rejas [steel window bars] had been unceremoniously ripped out of the rendering into which they had been bolted, the plastic rawlplugs still dangling on the bolt threads. Not were these units directly beneath an occupied unit but the unit at the opposite end of the block targeted, a distance of just 12m, was also occupied. Some noise cover would surely have been necessary. The brass of these bastards!

We have a different type of security gate on order, not a concertina type which some folks think are a bit fiddly to use, but I took the opportunity to get Carl to fit bolts to our vulnerable persianas [window shutters] and locks to the same windows.

A rather better greeting this morning, before we had been deflated by being made aware of the latest burglaries, was this misty dawn along the Jalón valley that greeted us.

As you can see, the sky looks less than settled and we are, indeed, expecting a weekend of biblical rain but I am in no doubt as to which greeting I prefer.

A 06:50 flight from Luton to Alicante with a 35-minute taxi ride to the airport means a 04:15 taxi pick up which in turn means a 03:30 alarm. Oh joy. [Note to self: I’m getting too old for this caper.] The access road into Luton Airport, being limited by tunnel restricting traffic to a single lane in either direction, occasionally gets clogged, especially in summer, but in winter it’s usually OK. Nonetheless, it’s best to err on the side of caution, hence our early pick-up.

Motorways being unpredictable beasts which, when they go wrong, offer no alternative route, our taxi company normally avoids the M1 and approaches through the debateable delights of Luton itself. What you really don’t expect at 04:30 in the morning is a stop-start traffic jam through some of the finer suburbs of Houghton Regis and Luton. Nonetheless, that’s what we ran into; a lengthy queue made up mostly of HGVs looking lost plus a coach towing a luggage trailer also looking lost [the coach, not the trailer] This smacked of a section of the M1 being closed and traffic being diverted off through largely residential areas to re-join the motorway further south..I never cease to be amazed at the amount of traffic on our roads at ridiculous hours of the day. One glitch and the lot grinds to a halt.

Knowing we had slack time and a driver that knew some inventive alternative routes mercifully unfamiliar to all the HGVs, or me, come to that, we avoided most of the disruption and arrived at the airport drop-off zone in good time. Even the airport traffic was flowing well.

Easyjet was on the ball this morning; we boarded quickly and pushed back about 5 minutes early. The flight was fine and smacked onto the Alicante runway in a less than subtle fashion at about 10:15. Our next delight was likely to the very slow-moving queue caused by the automatic passport machines at Alicante immigration. We wandered through the air-bridge in anticipation.

What’s this? Instead of being greeted by a melee of travellers about 20 deep and 10 wide, all waiting for the painfully slow e-passport machines, we were greeted by an orderly queue of folks 2 or 3 wide steadily shuffling towards two passport-reading warm bodies. The infernal machines were turned off and cordoned off. The two warm bodies were processing the queue in a fraction of the time taken by 5 or 6 machines. What I don’t know is whether Alicante has realized the error of its ways or whether there was simply a technical glitch. I hope it’s the former. Either way we were through and collecting our rental car in less than 5 minutes.

The rental car was a bit scary, being a brand-spanking new Ford Focus which apparently has only a 1-litre engine. It works, it has power, it’s smooth, it’s far and away the best rental car I’ve had in Spain. Being a brand new unblemished car, I decided to take the full insurance for some peace of mind in this season of peace and goodwill. 😉

Returning to Casa Libelule this time last year, we had been greeted by a damp issue: mould on various surfaces, including many of the walls, and a warped dining table. Since then, we’ve learned to leave some of the windows cracked open about 2cm to allow air exchange, and I’ve repainted with mould-resistant paint. This time Francine began raising our shutters to let light in for an inspection. It all looked good, even after what we believe has been a reasonably wet autumn for the area. No complaints; they need the rain desperately after about three years of drought.

What Francine did spot was a stranger wandering up the steps from the lower level of the development. Having no tools, he didn’t look like a workman. Shortly afterwards, we both saw him wandering downhill along the road. Though we may not recognize every owner/resident by sight, walking up hill to then walk down did not make him look like a resident. Curious! Our development has suffered a couple of burglaries recently and this looked a tad suspicious. Mercifully, Casa has thus far been spared.

We unloaded and popped into town for our traditional welcome to Spain lunch of calamari with pan y alioli.