Stop and Go

It has been over a month since my last post, so get ready for a long, but mostly fun, update

No more Spanish lessons Thank you Duolingo, for taking us from speaking not a word of Spanish to being able to make ourselves understood and understand a lot of what is being said to us, even over the phone. But after 575 consecutive days of at least 30 minutes (but often a lot more) of online Spanish lessons, we have decided to stop forcing ourselves to keeping this up. To be honest, I would never have been able to do this for 575 days in a row without the encouragement of Mirjam. And the same is true the other way around. But it became too much of a struggle and the decision to stop has given us a such a relief. We have learned enough to get by for now and once they start again, we will go for conversational lessons in town, probably in September. Meanwhile, we will repeat earlier lessons and review our list of vocabulary regularly.

Flowering Cacti There are quite a few types of cactus that flower, but we didn’t know we had any, until we witnessed this outside our bathroom window. The flowers stay 2 days and then die off. After a month they come back and that’s it for another year. But they are so pretty, even from the back!

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Orange Semolina cake with walnut One of Mirjam’s best cakes is this orange semolina cake with walnut. It is delicious and Grand Marnier helps keeping it moist and very tasty.

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Happy Birthday Mirjam On May first, we celebrated Mirjam’s birthday. We had a great day in the sun and Mark and Jacky came over for drinks and ‘bitterballen’ and stayed for dinner. A lovely time was had by all.

Velez Rubio Because of the pandemic, we haven’t gone out much since we have arrived in Spain. We go grocery shopping once a week and that’s about it. But our lawyer summoned us to come and work through some paperwork and that took us to Oria one sunny morning. Oria is about an hour’s drive west of where we live and we had the choice to go South and then West or North and then West. We go South once a week to get to the market and grocery store, so this was a good opportunity to explore the Northern route. We were very glad we did, because the trip North through the valley is absolutely stunning. Hardly any traffic, no towns at all, a few houses dotted along the hills, gorgeous fields with grass and poppies and the road just meanders through it all.

On the way back we stopped at a town called Velez Rubio, which is a lovely old town where we walked around a bit and had lunch.

This is the road back from the motorway through the valley to our house. I sped it up a little, but the video gives you a good impression of what the countryside looks like.

We forgot the thyme For some time now, we have been trying to buy fresh thyme, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Nothing in the supermarkets and on the weekly farmers’ market we managed to find a small pot of thyme once, but it died within days. We mentioned this to our neighbour Jacky and her response was “Oh don’t bother buying it, it grows right here in the riverbed.” And sure enough it does… easy to find too. Look:

Shower before you get wet When we were still in Holland, we had bought a solar shower for near the pool. We had picked a spot for it (north of the pool cabin), but we felt it needed some screens. I found some old gates on the premises, which I sanded, Mirjam painted, attached a shower curtain to it and we put them in the right spot together. We bolted the shower down to the tiled floor, connected it to the mains water and voila! An outside shower! Great for before or after swimming in the pool. I often shower there in the morning, although the water is quite cold then.

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The porch swing We found a great spot for the swing that I bought when I lived in California. There it was on the porch, where a porch swing is meant to be. And here, we placed it in the shade-providing triangle that Mark once built near the pool. Perfect spot!

Jeu-de-boules, pétanque, bocce Check this out !

A new spot We have so many places to choose from where we can have breakfast (dining room, porch, patio), but none of them have much sun around breakfast time. That is great in the summer when it is too warm anyway, but this time of year, it would be nice to be able to have breakfast outside, with the sun warming your bodies.

We have enough chairs, but we didn’t have a table. Mirjam had a frame from an old sewing machine that was used as a table for plants in the garden in Breda, but the table top had rotted away. We sanded the frame, painted it and then, we set out to find wood in one of the sheds. We quickly found the perfect pieces. I joined them together screwed them on the frame and hey presto, we had table. We love sitting out there, not just for breakfast, but in the evening, just before the sun disappears behind the mountain, it is a great spot too. And at night it is lovely to sit out there and see the stars.  

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Almería The other day, we had a crack in the car’s windshield. Our insurance company works with Carglass, so all we needed to do is take the car there and get the windshield replaced. The nearest Carglass shop is in Almería, 1.5 hours from our home, so we decided to make a day of it. After the window was replaced, we had lunch at the beach in the shade of an umbrella, with a lovely view of the Mediterranean Sea.

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In the afternoon we went to some stores that you can’t find around where we live and then headed home. It was a good day.

Various pictures from the past month

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