The King of Spain Had No Reason To Fear Our Visit !

I may have mentioned in my previous ramble that the days here were becoming much warmer and, although it is still officially Spring, it has felt as if Summer really is finally on its way. It has remained much the same pattern over the last three or four weeks since my last ramble, apart that is, from two or three consecutive days when it was unusually cloudy and overcast, but even then it had remained dry with temperatures hovering around the 20-22 degrees(c) mark, however, since the departure of that brief wayward weather system, it has been virtually wall to wall sunshine and, surprisingly, the mercury had even risen on one afternoon to 26 degrees(c), although to be honest, that sort of afternoon high is unusual at this particular time of year, even for this part of Southern Spain, but of course we were already preparing ourselves for we know that by the end of May the mercury is likely to regularly be showing daily temperatures of 30+ degrees(c), so whilst Shazza is building up her supply of Factor 50 sun cream, I will be stocking up with Anti-Hantavirus Vaccines, well you have to keep up with the changing bacterial threats don’t you 😂 Fortunately all of my usual suppliers maintain their stocks of these anti-viral medications 🍷🍷🍷

I have to be honest though, it is very nice to once again be able to sit on the balcony first thing in the morning with my coffee, watching the sunrise appearing at a little before 07:30am, with the daylight remaining until 9:30pm and so being able to also witness some beautiful sunsets. Having experienced the worst Winter here for the last ten years, where the mornings and evenings have certainly been far too cold to sit in my favourite room in the apartment, it now feels good to be back to some sort of normality and I am beginning to feel a lot like Keir Starmer, super-glued to my seat and unwilling to move 😂

We still find ourselves having to smile, if not bursting into fits of laughter, when we read both the daily and advance weather forecasts, for they never seem to be able to agree with each other, let alone get it anywhere near right, and so, just by way of yet another example, we were supposed to awake very recently to thunder and lightning and heavy rain, which would last, according to you know who 🤔 for a full 48 hours, whereas our much more reliable ‘Forrest Gump’ meteorological forecasting service, revealed blue sky and sunshine on each of those days. When I sit and reflect on it now, it seems that no matter where we may happen to have lived, be it in the UK, travelling in our Motorhome in our more nomadic days and even now, living here in Spain, no matter what the location the weather always seems to have an influence on our daily lives, either being too cold, too wet, floods, wildfires, too hot and even suffering prolonged droughts 🤷‍♂️ However, this ever changeable weather does provide certain ‘personal’ advantages for me, for without this ‘Works of Fiction’ subject, what else would I find to consistently ramble about 😂

We have also noticed, over the last week or so, that there is a much larger visible presence of Police in the area, and when I say larger presence I mean from there usually being literally no, or very little, visible presence to us now seeing, on a daily basis, lots of Police Officers (Policia Local, Policia National and Guardia Civil) on both foot and mobile patrols in the Marina and the Town, many more Police vehicles on the roads doing road side checks and even Guardia Civil Helicopters patrolling the coastal shorelines. At first we wondered if there had been a major incident in our locality, should we be concerned we wondered as we had seen nothing reported in either the local or national media 😲 Then it all became evidently clear for this increased presence, as we started to observe that certain Public Areas were also starting to be maintained, cracked paving tiles along the seafront promenade, which had been in a state of disrepair for the last couple of year’s, were now being replaced, many stretches of the main A7 Road in our immediate area were being fully re-surfaced, not just pot-holes being filled in, but was this not just scheduled work prior to the arrival of the new Summer Season’s tourist hoards 🤷‍♂️ Of course not, this recent increase in both the highly visible Police presence and the local Maintenance services, was due to one main event happening later in the month, which we became aware of by the large number of Advertising hoarding boards that had started to be erected, and covered with large posters with the faces of the Politicians representing the different Political Parties, yes of course, it was time for the Local And Regional Political Party Elections 🤷‍♂️ Once they were over, of course normal service would resume, the Police foot patrol officers would return to their air-conditioned offices within Police Stations, potholed-roads, that had not been repaired before the elections, would remain pot-holed, the cracked and broken pavements would remain cracked and broken, or perhaps that is just me being far too cynical again 🤔

However, apart from that, our own routine daily lives have just continued as normal and to be completely honest with you, it seemed a little pointless trying to pen a weekly ramble over the last three or four weeks as we really have not been up to very much, just the normal daily routines. We are of course still awaiting the outcome on our applications to renew our VISA’s and Residency Permits but we are not overly concerned about it, for as you know from my previous rambles around Spanish Bureaucracy, they rarely tend to do quick 🤷‍♂️ What is the worst that could happen 🤔 If, for whatever reason they choose to decline to extend our ‘Legal Immigrant’ status to reside here, then we will just remain here ‘Illegally’ for the next two years and then apply for ‘Official’ Residency status as ‘Illegal Migrants’, after all they are granting residency to half a million ‘Illegal Immigrants’ right now, so we may have a better chance using that route 😂

There is a heck of a lot of building works going on around us at the moment, a new nine Villa luxury complex at the bottom of the hill, each of these at a starting price advertised as being in excess of €880k, although the final price with Spanish Tax (IVA) and any other additional features (Swimming Pools, Luxury Kitchens & Bathrooms, Glass Curtained Balconies) that the new owner’s may wish to have included, will take the final price to over €1 Million, although there is not one new social housing development for the local populous included in any of the ongoing developments 🤷‍♂️ They have also just started putting in the foundations for another luxury Apartment complex, half way up the hill (or is it half way down 🤔) from our location and also, after a period of some two years of building Phases 1 & 2 of even more luxury Villas, they are now in the process of completing Phase 3, a complex of Luxury Apartments on the opposite side of the complex that is directly adjacent to us 🤷‍♂️ Fortunately, none of these new ‘Urbanisations’ will have any impact on our actual views, as they are all being built on land further down the hill, but the state of the roads, from all of the heavy construction traffic continuously driving back and forth over them, have left their scars 🤔 The main inconvenience for us is the noise from all of these construction sites, but more particularly, the amount of dust that is being created, our car exterior is constantly covered, on a daily basis, in a thin sheen of sand and construction dust, making washing it a pointless exercise 🤷‍♂️ However, every cloud has a silver lining as they say, and that is being reflected in the increase in the prices of existing properties that surround these new developments, which of course includes our own community of Apartments. However, as we have no intention of selling, we have not had a current valuation conducted on our own property although, our recent new neighbour, living immediately next door to us, purchased it for ‘well over’ €200k and that apartment has had no modernisation done to it since these were built, over twenty years ago, so who knows we may now be living in our own little gold mine 🤔

On the 4th May we hosted our first family visitor’s of the year, Shazza’s Aunt & Uncle, they have visited us almost every year over the 11 year’s that we have owned the property, but generally they used to come out during the Winter month periods, usually between December and March. This time they would be staying with us for 8 days, arriving late morning on the first day and departing late evening on the last day. We went out every day, although they had by now seen most places within our local area, so finding somewhere new to visit was always going to be a challenge for us.

It was 437 years ago, when Sir Francis Drake paid a visit to Cadiz, with his flotilla of warships, that being of course for a far less touristy or friendly purpose, which is referred to historically as, the ‘Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard’ which delayed the ‘Spanish Armada’ by a full year. Now similar to our own ‘Province’ of Malaga, for which ‘Malaga City’ is the capital, Cadiz is also a large ‘Province’ with ‘Cadiz City’ as its Capital.

There are three ways to enter the Island Isthmus from the mainland, a road from the South, or a choice of two road bridges on the Eastern Side. I plotted a route on the Sat Nav to a Car Park on the North Eastern side and discovered that it was in fact just a little over 80 miles from us, on a straightforward, primarily all dual-carriageway road, which would take across the most Northerly of the two road bridges with a total journey time of just a little under ninety-minutes.

Unlike Sir Francis Drake though, we had no hostile intentions and so ‘The King of Spain Had No Reason To Fear Our Visit !’ on this occasion. Although Shazza and I had made a day visit to Cadiz many year’s previously, that was during our more nomadic motor-homing days and, to be completely honest, it was a very brief visit and so we have always said that one day we would like to return to do it a little more justice. On the selected day of our trip the ‘Works of Fiction’ forecast a very warm and sunny day, although being on on an Island jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, we anticipated that it may be a little blustery so we went prepared. As Cadiz City is less that a two hour drive away from us, and our visitor’s had never been there before, it seemed like a decent opportunity to tick another place off our own ‘To Do List’, whilst also providing them with another memory of their visit to us.

It was extremely easy finding our way to our nominated car park, although we were a little surprised, with it being within a very short and easy walk into the ‘Old Town’, to find that there were ample parking spaces available when we arrived at around 10:00am, and even more pleasantly surprised when we came to leave to find that it only cost €1 an hour to park. Cadiz is a very walkable city, no need to catch buses to get from one area to another, although they did have the customary tourist ‘Hop On, Hop Off’ buses which I guess take you to all the major Tourist attractions without you having to find them for yourselves, or if you are limited in time. However, the discovering of these places for ourselves is the bit that I tend to like, just wandering around aimlessly through narrow cobbled streets and discovering Plazas, large and small, or beautiful Green Parks, and of course the many different watering holes, for it is thirsty work being a tourist 😉

A few photo’s below from our day………………

After a lot of walking, although still not having seen everything their was to see in the ‘Old Town’, our visitor’s were all walked out, so we suggested driving a little further down the coastline, only around half an hour to ‘Chiclana’, well not to the town itself, which is a couple of miles inland, but to the nearby ‘La Barossa Beach’, a long stretch of beautiful white sandy beach with a promenade that had a lot of eateries overlooking the sparkling blue sea where we could enjoy a very late lunch. We had been here before and knew that our guests would enjoy it.

Apart from the full day trip to Cadiz and the Beachside lunch, the rest of their time spent with us we just remained in the local area, with walks to the Marina and into our local town, and a short drive into Estepona, for they tend to like just enjoying the weather and being sat with a nice glass of something cold, or eating relaxed lunches and going out on several nights for Dinner. Fortunately, they only experienced one day of drizzle with grey overcast skies and a very strong wind, although the wet stuff was just a bit hit and miss, but the majority of their days with us were very warm and sunny 😎

We took our visitor’s back to Malaga Airport for their evening flight home. Once we returned home ourselves, it felt very strange, for after entertaining, being tourist guides and the in-house catering for guests, for eight days, the apartment felt empty and so very quiet. We were both all talked out, so we sat in silence on the balcony with a nice hot cuppa. We knew that it would take us a good couple of days to get back into our own normal routines, it always does, comprising of one day doing a full domestic clean, including Shazza stripping the beds and catching up with all the laundry and ironing, and then one complete day of doing absolutely nothing, not even stepping out of the apartment to go for our more usual walk, we both agreed that we had done enough of that recently 😮‍💨 We enjoy having family and friend’s stay with us, having different people to converse with, in our own native language and catching up on all the news and gossip from back home, as well as sharing our beautiful location and lifestyle with them. But it is much the same as when we have been away somewhere on holiday ourselves, it is always nice to get back to some sort of normality afterwards.

As I write this, the local elections here have not yet taken place, although I guess that it will be much the same as any other elections, in any other country, where some political faces may change, a different party may gain overall majority in the Coalition Government that we have here, but in reality nothing much will change after that, pre-election promises will still continue to be broken, that is par for the course, just the same old story really on the merry-go-round of Politics on our planet, why any of us ‘normal folk’ should expect anything any different I do not know 🤷‍♂️ We are still awaiting news about our VISA’s but not holding our breaths, we still continue to adopt the philosophy of not worrying about things that we have no control of. It appears that the War on Iran, that a certain President claimed to be over weeks ago, is still ongoing, as is the one between Russia and Ukraine, so it is good to see that not much has changed in the eight days that I have purposely not been reading the Global ‘Doom and Gloom’ media reports. Spain has just announced that it has enough Aviation Fuel for the next three months so, at least you can leave Spain to go on your Summer holidays, although I am not quite sure how you would get back from any of the Countries that are running out of it 🤷‍♂️ Normal fuel prices for vehicles (Petrol & Diesel) are falling slightly here, although still not back to the prices they were before the crisis, funny how they always go up immediately there is news of a shortage, but are much slower in coming down when there isn’t one 🤔

But to end on a much more positive note, the sun is still shining, the temperatures are still climbing, the sea and the sky are both still a lovely shade of Blue and to top it all, my favourite Cafe/Bars still have copious supplies of both Anti-Covid and Anti-Hantivirus Vaccines. So yup !! It is a tough life here in our little corner of the Iberian Peninsular, but never fear for I am determined to be brave and suffer it for as long as I am able to, and you can rest assured that I will continue to dedicate myself in providing you, my reader’s, with these lifestyle hardship updates, well at least for the next four weeks until our Residency Permits expire 😁🫣

Until the next ramble…………..

Hasta Luego mi Amigos, La Vida Es Buena