A beautiful morning dawned, cool but sunny. There’s an interesting phenomenon we’ve noticed on other visits to our friends’ house which is also half way up the mountain; fire smoke rises so far above the vineyards and then spreads out in a layer You don’t see it from down on the valley floor, you have to be in an elevated situation. This morning a fire was putting up smoke and it was forming a layer for Francine to capture, still clad in her dressing gown. We really are being spoilt being the only ones here.

In the same way that major construction works celebrate their start by breaking the ground, I thought I should bite the bullet and drill my hole in a Spanish wall. I’m familiar with English constructions methods and am comfortable drilling holes in English walls but Spanish construction is something new; they use blocks with large holes in them. I could imagine drilling into nothingness looking for a fixing. A friend over here, living full time in the same urbanization had kindly lent me a collection of wall plugs and screws. The very same friend was the reason I needed to drill this first hole in the first place. Being aware of my dragonfly obsession, he had purchased for Casa Libélule, a magnificent ornamental dragonfly to put up on a wall.  Anatomically accurate it isn’t – it seems to have eight wings though that isn’t obvious from the picture. So, to note both its curious wing configuration and also its purchaser, I have dubbed it Octodoptera murdochii. As you can see, my first Spanish drilling was successful.

Flushed with success, I went on to attack our partially finished filling cabinet – partially finished because a couple of screw holes proved a little too big for the screws provided. Before resorting to messy resin mixtures, I tried a trimmed plastic wall plug. Strewth, it worked! Once the drawer runners were securely fixed, our badly behaved cabinet was soon finished. Downstairs with it.

Enough work, time for some play. Today is March 17th. Along with a few other friends in the valley, the folks we dog-sit for and the purchaser of Octodoptera murdochii, we had been invited to lunch by a Scottish couple, living over here full time, and instructed to dress in either green, orange or white. Fortunately I had packed a distressingly bright green fleece. Now here was what I can only describe as complete international confusion: an English car load (Francine volunteered to drive) descended upon a Scottish household in Spain to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Go figure, as they say in America! There was another couple invited to the gathering, the man of which proved to be the Irish connection.  Mind you, his wife was Italian, despite sounding like a Londoner and nothing at all like an Italian. Mind you, the Irishman didn’t sound in the vaguest bit Irish. I felt more than a little relieved that the two Scotsmen at least sounded Scottish, even if one of them was dressed as a Leprechaun. Well done, chaps! [Inset your own joke beginning, “An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman went into a bar …”] The green beer was an inventive twist, I thought. 😀

And I got confused on the ferry because of “welcome to Malta” messages and Norwegian Google search screens. Sheesh!

Monday: bed delivery day. Today we should get our own bed (as opposed to the guest room bed that we’ve been using hitherto). Since the bed delivery men had my mobile phone number, I was tasked with waiting at home for the call announcing that they were on their way. Meantime Francine – yes, you guessed it – would go shopping again. This arrangement suited me fine; anything that got me a day without dragged around shops was fine by me.

Actually, I did have an early morning flirtation with the shops, to a local building supply hardware store called “Tot Util”, known affectionately as Totty’s. I was in search of sandpaper to smooth down my glued dead table, a protective sheet to stand the oak furniture pieces on whilst oiling them, some drill bits and a solution to my drawer cabinet’s problem of screw holes that are too big. I returned with a bag full of goodies from Totty’s whose assistant happily spoke enough English to be able to understand my needs and help me.

Francine hit the shops. Her only task that I was particularly interested in was her trip to Moraira to visit Telitec to see if we could arrange for some Internet access. Telitec offers a Pay-As-You-Go Wi-Fi service by radio dish, no landline required, that sounded ideal for occasional visitors to Spain. Phone ‘em up when you arrive at Alicante airport, or wherever, and get them to switch the service on. Tell ‘em when to stop it as you leave and just pay for when you’re here. 40€ for four weeks gets a 2Mb service, 50€ for four weeks gets a 4Mb service – both plus IVA [VAT], of course. The only alternative would be paying for a full 12 months which, whilst cheaper per month, would still mean paying for the whole year. The PAYG approach seemed most appropriate.

Francine returned with a booking on Wednesday morning for a site survey to make sure that a signal existed, plus a Spanish PAYG mobile telephone. also from Telitec. There were a few other items in her bag of goodies but they were incidental, a thermometer for the balcony, for example. Incidentally, today has been quite cool topping out at a disappointing 11°C. Spain, warm?

While Francine was out doing good works, I amused myself assembling the remaining four dining chairs. Two more cardboard boxes bit the dust. OI also opened the dining table’s extension leaf fully expecting it to be just a slab of oak that required no assembly. Wrong! There were three pieces of wood to screw to it. I duly screwed them to it and another cardboard box bit the dust. 3 more down, 4 to go.

Just as Francine was returning, my phone rang. It was the bed delivery men saying they’d be here in 30-40 minutes. Great! I sat with a beer and watched. Eventually, a white van dawdled along a narrow lane down in the valley and turned up a dirt track just before our development. It reversed back to the narrow lane and continued into our development. The white van disappeared from view but I then spotted the roof of the van between some houses getting closer. It didn’t seem to get any closer and I feared they’d stopped too soon, perhaps wondering where we were. Since Hobble-along Cassidy was incapacitated, Francine went down to show them where we actually were. She was gone a long time. I then saw the suspect white van exiting the development and turn towards Alcalalí. This was either the wrong van or the driver was completely confused. I jumped in the car to rescue Francine from climbing back up the countless steps.

A dark blue van appeared and headed for us. This van was definitely the correct van ‘cos we could see that it had “Bed Specialists” emblazoned across its side panels.It almost made it but, as I went out to greet it, it reverse into our parking area and used it to turn around rather than coming on in. It drove back down the hill and turned up the wrong road, a blind alley. I gave chase in the car, met them and beckoned them in. Finally, two guys delivered and built our new bed along with a very sexy headboard and the bedside cabinets which is what we really wanted. [The headboard and cabinets came as a discounted bulk purchase, ex-display, but we’d seen none better.] We have a bed and very splendid it looks, too. We’ll be trying it out tomorrow night. Too tired to change rooms tonight. 😉

I’m saving the last four cardboard boxes for Wednesday which is forecast to have horrendous rain all day long.

Almost? Well, yes, almost.

With a quiet Sunday morning and early afternoon in prospect prior to visiting our friends down in the valley for Sunday dinner, I thought it was a good time to attack more of my 16-box 3D jigsaw of oak furniture that had been delivered. One of the items that we’d selected was a 3-drawer unit on castors, acting as sort of a filing cabinet, that was designed to go with our escritorio [writing desk]. With three drawers, each of which would doubtless need assembling, it was likely to be one of the more complex sections of jigsaw. I unpacked it and sure enough, the box of hardware fittings was huge.

All was going well until I came to attach the drawer runners to the inside of the cabinet. Six runners were each fixed by three screws. Of the 18 pre-drilled screw holes, two failed to provide a solid fixing for their screws. The runners may not have been screwed but I was. 😀 I finished assembling everything that I could and left the sides of the cabinet awaiting a solution, whatever that might be – thinking caps on and hardware store browsing required.

I turned my attention to the two boxes containing the dining table. This, I’d hoped, would be as straightforward as the escritorio had been. I unpacked it and, sure enough, the table top was ready assembled and really only needed the legs bolting in place. That done, Francine spotted a small split and raised splinter of wood on one side rail of the table top. Bother! Sunday’s aren’t quite completely dead in Spain, a coffee shop was open in Jalón and so was a glory hole like “bazaar” run by enterprising Chinese individuals and containing all manner of both useful and useless items – affectionately referred to as Chinese takeaways. After a coffee, we found a small pot of white wood glue in the Chinese takeaway. We now have a dead dining room table, flat on its back with its legs in the air, complete with glued splinter weighed down by a tool box supported by a tin of olives. Very inventive!

Anxious for some success, I decided to attack a couple of the six dining chairs. Dining chairs come in boxes of two so I unpacked one box and set about checking all the supplied components. It all seemed to be there so I started screwing them together. Large bolts of three different lengths seemed to hold each chair together quite securely. The trick with chairs, of course, is get all four legs to touch the ground at the same time so they don’t wobble. Here i was on a completely tiled Spanish floor and naturally soem of the tiles are at slightly different levels. So, pick a set of four tiles and adjust the chair legs on those. Then hope that your unsuspecting diner picks a set of four similarly arranged tiles. It was impossible to adjust the legs such they were totally stable in an infinite set of locations. Such is life.

We left the glue on the dead dining table drying while we went for a very relaxing dinner with our friends.

That should be singular, or course. Whereas most women appear to regard shopping as a recreational pastime,  if not an Olympic sport, most men, in my experience, are the exact opposite. A man’s approach is this: if you must go to the shops, grab what you want, pay for it and leave – get it over with – don’t window shop – don’t dilly-dally. Our two weeks over in Spain during February, when we actually bought Casa Libélule, were largely subsequently spent shopping to kit it out. Now we are back on our second trip, our initial goal was not so much shopping as visiting the same businesses again paying balances and arranging delivery of items previously shopped. Two of those visits, however, almost inevitably resulted in further purchases. What a thrill, more shopping. Arghhh!

Today, as had been forecast, rain arrived accompanied by a dramatic fall in temperature. Our butterfly attracting 23°C of yesterday fell to an Anglo-Saxon chilling 8°C this morning. With such fluctuations, anyone would think we were in England , except for yesterday’s 23°C in March, I suppose. Never mind, cold rain is perfect weather for some recreational shopping. Oh joy! We were off in search of more lights, external, this time, one for the front door and two for the balconies. We also wanted ceiling fans for the two main bedrooms. A business in Dénia had been recommended so that’s where we headed. One of this shops advantages for us was that it was directly above a Casa (the house-ware shop chain, not our house) where we also wanted to buy some decent wine glasses. We set off having first loaded the car with the waste cardboard from yesterday’s construction activities to dump it in the local basura for recycling.

There was a free parking space right outside the shop – yeah! Inside the shop was a bewildering array of lights: wall lights for inside, uplighters, bedside lights, wall lights for outside, ceiling fans with lights, ceiling fans without lights, artistic flight of fancy lights … and so it went on. I don’t know what has happened to us over in Spain but, once again, we both agreed on our favourite design of external wall light and on the most appropriate ceiling fan plus light for our bedrooms. I breathed a sigh of relief at a quick decision and picked up three outside wall lights and two remote control, 3-bladed ceiling fans. We carried them to the cash register where a lady, much more adept than we would be, picked out the relevant LED light bulbs to go with them plus couple of batteries for our fans’ remotes. We’d also seen a decent, simple uplighter for our dining area and added that to the mix. 462.00€. I patted my heart and muttered, “keep going you fool”. The shop assistant smiled and changed the price to 450.00€ – not a huge discount but worth a bit of Tom Foolery. 🙂

On to Casa and wine glasses. A little up-front research had shown that Casa had an event with 40% off it’s premium range of wine glasses. Choosing a dozen 47cl stemmed wine glasses and half a dozen cava glasses was easy. Naturally, the female of our party couldn’t leave it at that and started shopping around for other things that we didn’t know we needed. The salad spinner, I thought, did look useful. The hooked dangly crappy plastic thing to hold who-knows-what in the shower cubicle (when we’ve actually got a cubicle), I thought was perhaps destined for failure.

We returned with our carload of purchases and I was vindicated – the tacky shower doobrie did, indeed, turn out to be a waste of space, in the shower at least; it now lives under the sink holding Darwin knows what.

Our sun returned in the afternoon though the air was still chill. I warmed myself up assembling our five-shelf bookcase, which was blissfully straightforward, followed by our strong-enough-to-support-the-Bismarck escritorio [writing desk], which was also, rather surprisingly, very straightforward, only the legs needing bolting into place. This Danish wooden furniture certainly seems to be built to last. This is what another three cardboard boxes produced.

5 down, 11 to go. I’m hoping that the dining table will be as straightforward as the escritorio. 🙂

After our second which was largely spent by recuperating from the financial shocks of yesterday, the morning dawned grey and overcast. Today, we were expecting two furniture deliveries. Our excitement at no longer living in a white furniture-free box was palpable.

I really must learn how to answer my mobile phone properly. Yesterday evening, whilst having a beer or four with the boys, my phone had begun warbling. I’d made the mistake of changing the ring tone so didn’t recognize it as being mine that was ringing. By the time I got to it, my caller had given up. The call log showed a Spanish number. A while later, the same thing happened again. One of my pals could call back for free whereas my phone would rack up international call charges – what a nice man – so call back we did. It had been the helpful lady at Aitana saying that our sofas would arrive between midday and 1:00 PM.

So, with two deliveries expected, limp-along/hobble-along Franco was to remain behind awaiting delivery vans whilst Francine went and did what women do best, more shopping. 😀 To be fair, she was also popping in to our friendly estate agent [no, still can’t get used to that combination] to see what might be happening with the plumber and our shower screens.

The morning had brightened and, with the sun coming out, so had some local butterflies. The hillside behind Casa Libélule is essentially scrub but resembles something more akin to a building site, largely because that’s what it was going to be before any further development ceased. There are a few clumps of Red Valerian in bloom and these were attracting the nectar feeders, one of which was one of my absolute favourite butterflies, this pristine looking Swallowtail (). The Swallowtail had a Wall Brown () for company, which wasn’t pausing to meet its public, a Hummingbird Hawkmoth () and a very tatty Painted Lady (). What a pleasant way to hobble about whiling away the time waiting for delivery vans.

Good to their word, at about 12: 15 PM, from my vantage point up the mountain, I watched an Aitana van turn off the main Jalón-Alcalalí road into our development. Eventually the van climbed the rather steep hill towards the parking area behind our houses. I hobbled out to meet them and beckon them to the correct casa. Two sofas had arrived, all wrapped in protective bubble wrap. With all the cushions in place and the bubble wrap on, they wouldn’t fit through the entrance door – yes, that entrance door, the one that had caused all the lock/security problems.  The bubble wrap was prized apart, cushions were removed and the sofas now fitted – just! Good job we hadn’t ordered anything larger. The men positioned them where we thought we wanted them and departed armed with all the packing and bubble wrap. I’d also assembled our extravagantly stylish LED standard light to complete the picture. It’s beginning to look like a home.

Shortly afterwards, at about 1:00PM, a second van, this time I hoped from JYSK, turned in. This should be lugging a serious amount of heavy oak pre-furniture. I say pre-furniture because this little lot was coming flat-packed and would need assembling. JYSK does offer an assembly service but it doesn’t come cheap; it would’ve cost us several hundred euros more to have it built. Daunting though the task appeared given the amount of furniture involved, we’d elected to do it ourselves. That is to say, we’d elected that I would do it. 😀 Once again I went outside to beckon them to the right house. The two guys walked in and out eventually leaving us with a somewhat daunting array of 16 cardboard boxes of various shaped and sizes. Casa’s brief flirtation with having looked like a home ended almost as quickly as it started and it now resembles more of a warehouse. 🙂

Faced with 13 bits of furniture split over 16 cardboard boxes, one has to start somewhere. I chose the glass-topped coffee table. As it turns out, this was, perhaps, the worst choice, there being so many individual pieces to assemble. The four main legs were of two different part numbers and each of the four sides that support the glass top was made of two separate pieces, one of which also came in two separate patterns. I made one mistake and had to redo it. Eventually, all my subassemblies were ready. Now we come to another human genome deficiency: two hands was always a poor design but two hands are quickly shown to be completely inadequate when one tries to juggle six separate engagement points on two heavy subassemblies. Four match up but two inevitably miss, requiring that you now take apart the four that originally docked successfully. Marvellous, you get the two recalcitrant lugs to dock but, of course, now two of the originally well-behaved lugs wander out of line and fail to dock. Repeat! Somehow, eventually I got all six points to engage and moved on the other pair of sides where the same problem occurred. If only we were like that Indian God with countless arms – we’d be able to careful position each individual lug at the same time. Perhaps, if we continue to assemble enough flat-pack furniture, evolution will lend a hand and increase our arm count. Anyway, sans glass top ‘cos the wood has to be oiled first, here it is.

Just another 14 cardboard boxes to go, then. Still, rain is forecast for tomorrow.

After yesterday’s excitement of leaving Portsmouth harbour at 8:30 AM, the remainder of the day had been a mixture of either staring at the horizon slowly bobbing up and down and/or feeling queazy, in Francine’s case. Fortunately, the night had settled Francine’s stomach; she awoke with renewed vigour actively seeking breakfast. We arose in leisurely fashion, had tea, of sorts – better sorts than at the Travelodge – in our cabin and sauntered down for breakfast before the hoards descended. Francine stuck with scrambled eggs on toast – classic sick puppy food – whilst I went for the full English at a very reasonable £4.95.

After breakfast and 25 hours at sea, we soon had just another two hours to run until our arrival in Bilbao harbour – a doddle, really, just a little more than the 90 minutes of our usual Dover-Calais run. We spent yet more time watching the horizon bob gently up and down. There are a couple of popular forms of holiday that neither Francine nor I can understand the attraction of and one of them, the main one, is cruising. I completely understand why cruise passengers might step off their luxury cruise liner 2 stones/28 lbs heavier than they were when they embarked because other than eating and drinking whilst watching the horizon bob up and down, there’s really bugger all else to do.

“Only two hours until lunch, dear”.

“Oh, alright, there’s time for another pre-prandial or two, then.”

“The horizon’s still there.”  [Sip]

“That’s a relief.” [Glug]

How on earth do people put up with this for a week or two? I was stir-crazy after a single day.

We avoided any further ingestion of food or drink  by thrumming our fingers and twiddling our thumbs for a couple of hours and eventually our ferry drifted serenely past Bilbao’s outer harbour wall, though it was still 30 minutes until we were docked and told to return to our vehicles.

Flashback: Whilst boarding at Portsmouth, vehicle drivers had been urged to “turn off your vehicle alarms during the crossing”. Not knowing how to do so, I returned to our car to consult the manual, only to discover that there really was no way to lock the car without the alarm  being enabled, except, it seemed, by leaving a door less than firmly shut or, more appealingly, leaving the back hatch slightly ajar. I had chosen the latter and returned to begin our voyage. [Aside: Now look, Honda, why on earth is there no way of disabling the alarm? Wake up!] Now here we were, returning to our car 27 hours later when Francine announced that the boot light was on and clearly had been so for the duration, 27 hours. Oh Bother, or words to that effect! The car still seemed to have power; the damned boot light still glowed, after all, and the windows still lowered. We sat in the car, desperately attempting not to use any further battery power and waited 15 or 20 minutes for heaven knows what until we were finally told to start our engines ready for disembarkation. What on earth takes so long at Bilbao? By now, if we’d arrived at Calais, we’d have been on the autoroute and heading for Normandy.

Heart in mouth and praying to all the gods I don’t believe in, I turned the ignition key. Utter relief, it worked, our beautiful car started. Well, it did have a brand new 75 amp/hour battery and we’d been shining a singe low power light for just 27 hours. Nonetheless, it had been a nervous end to our boring sea voyage, thinking that we might be responsible for holding up an already tediously slow disembarkation.

Once off the ferry, we sat in a tediously slow queue for another 15 minutes waiting on the pleasure of Spanish immigration, who had clearly been surprised by our scheduled arrival, one of only two a week. Finally, at about 1:00 PM local time, we were out of the harbour complex and dicing with the tangled web of roads before heading towards Zaragoza on an almost empty autopista.

Once on the open road for this first stage of our road journey, it was a case of setting the cruise control to a few KPH below the 120  national limit, just to be safe, and steering the car. There was blissfully little to impede progress. It’s 306 kilometres/190 miles from Bilbao to Zaragoza and I swear to Darwin that we see more traffic covering the 2 miles between our house and the centre of our home town than we did on this road. This was driving heaven, though we did pay a toll of 32.50€ for the privilege. We never see this little traffic on the M1 in the UK, even at 2:00 AM.

We had missed the almond blossom season in Jalón, normally early February, because for some reason the blossom was late appearing this year and we returned from our previous trip before it had burst forth. Once it did burst forth, it didn’t last very long. However, our journey through the Rioja and Navarra wine regions now made up for it as we past stretches of quiet road lined with the various subtle pink shades of blossom-covered almond trees. Quite delightful!

After Zaragoza we headed for Teruel on a  now free autopista [much better]. The traffic wasn’t any heavier, though, until we left Teruel behind and reached Valencia in fading light on the eastern coast. As darkness fell, we were now on more familiar territory, having ferried friends back and forth to Valencia airport on a few previous visits. After another hour and a quarter or so, we approached Casa Libélule, parked and began unloading the car at about 9:00 PM. We seem to be the only residents in the dozen or so currently sold properties of the development. This solitude, of course, could spoil us.

Our friends in Jalón had been up to turn on our fridge and leave us fresh milk, bread, charcuterie and cheese for a late evening feast. A beer or two slaked our thirsts first and a bottle of wine washed down the picnic on our balcony as we watched the lights in the valley below and the stars in the cloudless sky above. Contentment!

At last, we collapsed into our guest room’s bed, currently the only piece of furniture that Casa Libelule possesses, to spend our first night in our mostly empty new home.

Despite having to lash out on a Toby Carvery dinner and a night away in a Travelodge – boy, do I know how to treat a lady – we were very pleased that we had not done the alternative 3:00 AM alarm and run down in the early morning option. This had been much more civilized. Checking in at Portsmouth ferry port, with only two boats scheduled, was also more civilized than Dover East ever is. We checked in with Brittany Ferries, I stuck on the headlight deflectors and we waited. Eventually loading began and our adventure continued.

Leaving Portsmouth harbour was a little unusual for us so we just had to watch. Fortunately, the morning was bright and dry, if a little chilly. There’s an interesting piece of modern architecture towering above the harbour which I thought might be a control tower for the harbour. I’m sure everyone else knows perfectly well what it is. 🙂 We left the remnants of the British Navy in our wake as we exited the harbour, before skirting the Isle of Wight to the east and heading west down the English Channel.

Not long into our 27-hour voyage, both Francine and I received messages from Tesco Mobile announcing, “Welcome to Malta. These are your costs while you are here: …”. Gosh, these modern ferries must really get a move on! Clearly our progress was very brisk, though I worried about the accuracy of our navigation officer.

There’s Internet access on board, of a sort, anyway. We managed to navigate its intricacies and finally got connected. My next geographical surprise was being presented with a google.no search screen from Norway. Interesting! Well, where the heck am I, Malta or Norway? Judging by a passing diagram, our Internet access is satellite based so we must be suffering from a little satellite location confusion. Internet access is VERY slow but, when you manage to drive it correctly, it does work, though you have to be very patient and not keep hitting keys/buttons when nothing appears to happen – just wait.

Progress down the Channel was a little lumpy. Being a well-know bad sailor, I had taken a couple of Stugeron travel pills as a precaution. Francine had not and began feeling a little under the weather. Eventually we both retired to our very pleasant outside cabin and stopped confusing our semi-circular canals further by adding to he motion – lying still on a bed was definitely the best option. Francine popped some pills and I topped mine up.

The TV in our cabin provided some welcome distraction until it was time to try to sleep.