THE GF IS UNWELL.................

29th.february 2012

Did I mention that the GF has been unwell ? it's lasted 3 weeks and comes and goes, more coming than going. Every time she feels better we go out for a bike ride and the rather persistent cool breeze knocks her back again. So she felt rough on Saturday after the ride across the salt marshes when the return trip was into the breeze and by Sunday morning I had to do something. Phoned our medical insurance and explained the situation and then spoke to a nurse. They had a dedicated Spanish desk and they looked up our location and advised that we went to the Ramon Jimenez Hospital in Huelva which was on their list of Ok places. Huelva is 35 miles away so our friendly taxi was summoned again at 10.30 and off we went. Checking in was ok after I shut her up and told her that my muy poco espanol was better than her no habla espanol so let me do the talking for both of us..we were soon whisked into the system and taken to the classification room ( as we later realised ) where a very nice lady nurse/doctor spoke no english whatsoever - and why not, it is Spain after all. Having established the language barrier, the lady clutched her chest in the bosom area and said 'Dolores' ; The gf clutched her bosom and said 'Felicity'; the lady pointed to her back and said 'Dolores'; the gf said 'Felicity' and smiled. This continued for some moments, until the lady had pointed to most of her upper body, crying 'Dolores' and the gf smiling and crying 'Felicity'. Sensing a misunderstanding, I was thumbing through the Berlitz Useless Phrase Book until I discovered that Dolores? means pain? and that she was not introducing herself in a friendly fashion as the gf had assumed, merely trying to locate any pain in a businesslike manner.Gosh how we all laughed.

Start again with acting,pointing and muy poco espanol until some sort of diagnosis was reached. This is when we discovered that we were in classification and not in front of a doctor. We could have been sent to Area A which was empty, Area C which had 4 customers or Area B which had about 50 people .......no prizes for guessing where we were sent without any idea of the system. Time revealed that the system was train-station type loudspeaker announcement which sent people through swing doors to oblivion. After an hour and a half of wondering whether we missing something and my muy poco espanol eliciting that time as we know it ceased to exist in this place (although, strangely enough, not in the carpark where the taxi meter appeared to function in real time quite satisfactorily). However at the precise moment I was enquiring how long it would be, the station announcer launched into something which included ' Felicity Joyce'so we crashed through the swing doors. Our Only problem was that we had failed to understand the subsequent instructions and now stood in the midst of mayhem in the A&E ward like spare pricks at a wedding. Fortunately we were rescued by the man who was probably next in the queue who had watched our hesitant entry and now followed us in to say 'Cuatro' and point down the corridor where there was indeed a Room 4 and a young lady doctor expecting us.

To cut a long story, after no hablo inglese, and my offer to ring the insurers who had said that they would translate if we had a problem, a dishy young male doctor was located who spoke english. The GF got her wish of someone to shine a light down her throat and she was told she had Pharyngitis. The antibiotics she had been taking since wednesday (supplied by her dentist before we left the uk in case an abscess flared up) were pronounced the correct treatment but the dosage was inadequate and probably useless. So we given a prescription for 875mg tablets ( hers were 125mg), a new linctus for the cough and tablets that fizz in water to help the bronchial relief and sent on our way. The berlitz useless phrasebook does not tell you how to say 'thank you, you have been very helpful'but it does supply you a number of phrases on how to pick up gay men in a bar. I just bowed,smiled and said gracias a lot.

Our taxi driver was still waiting and for the 70 mile/3.5 hour journey charged us €70 and wouldn't take a tip which seemed fair enough on a sunday morning. So the Gf spent 3 days in bed, and is now up and about again although still sniffing but not coughing and feeling like **** and the white spots in her throat have all gone. The insurers rang on monday and tuesday to check progress which was nice, and have now closed the case.

NB. For interest, I did take the tour of the fish markets and, as it turned out, the finer old buildings of Isla Cristina. The fish port is the main one in Andalucia, with a fleet of over 300 ships and is a rarity in that every catch is sold daily in total, so that everything is fresh. The auction is computerised, boxes of fish on a long conveyor belt which are weighed with details of the trawler they come from and as each box reaches a red line it stops whilst a dutch auction starts counting down . Buyers in the stand press a button on their hand held controllers to stop the auction when they feel the price is right and they want to buy. The variety of fish is enormous, and some boxes only have 1 or 2 fish in them. A lot of buyers are from local restaurants and they are looking for relatively small lots. The area is famous for its clams of which tons are landed daily. There's a lot of fish in the sea.

ISLA CRISTINA...THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

23rd.February 2012

Weeks in Isla Cristina are like Dave Edmunds albums - you really only need one. To call it a bombsite is being unfair, but since a great deal of Spain resembles a bombsite, it is being fairly accurate. IC has 2 sources of income : Fishing and Tourism.

The Fish Harbour is a hive of activity with 2 fleets coming in daily......Sardines are netted overnight, the small trawlers festooned with more floodlights than Colin McRaes rally car and landed from 9am with the auction starting from 10am. We inadvertently wandered in and watched for an hour, only discovering that this was strictly forbidden for tourists when we read the notices on the way out. (This notice did however promise that should we present ourselves at the Tourist Office, close by, we would be offered a free guided tour. I did so, and now have a ticket to go back at 16.30 next monday to see the second catch of the day being landed and auctioned. And this free tour has only cost me €1.50 - a bargain ).From the amount of sardines we saw it is a surprise that there are any left in the sea round here. The sardines are hauled up from holds in huge barrels and then sorted into polystyrene boxes apparently by size. Anything not a sardine is tossed onto the quayside and whilst tourists are not allowed on the harbour, the locals hover like vultures to snatch up the many and varied discards. Whether this is a current social trend or a traditional perk long established, I do not know, but we saw a huge amount of fish going into plastic bags,and certainly in many cases enough to supply medium size restaurants with todays pescados fritos on the menu de dia.

After lunch the offshore trawlers arrive with everything else, especially clams, the local speciality. We have watched these trawlers from the beach as they go backwards appearing to scrape the clams off the seabed...I shall no doubt learn more on monday. From this, it may be deduced that every eatery, of which there are many, specialises in fish. Perusing the english version of one menu, my favorite mis-translation under Eggs & Scrambled Eggs

is " Shaken with the seaweed and spawn of the sprocket wheels with prawns".

Unfortunately the GF was just recovering and whilst tempted settled for a spanish omelette to be safe - I had the fresh baby anchovy which was delicious. So fishing is big here for quite a small town.

Now for Tourism. I use the word tourism in the sense that Great Yarmouth mentions tourism ie not the international variety but the local homegrown sort. I doubt that you'll find an entry in the Thomas Cook's or Thompsons' brochures for Isla Cristina although it does boast a Barcello hotel and several others of good quality but I may be proved wrong by an uppitty offspring with too much time on his hands. And,re tourism, despite the dutch here and the germans wildcamping in the beachfront carparks, it is still the off-season and whilst we all stroll around in shorts and t-shirts (apart from the GF who is always well wrapped up), no self respecting spaniard has yet removed his hoodie,fleece,jumper,scarf,jeans and boots, it still being winter and bloody cold and all that. So there are very few homegrown tourists about ( this week is an anomaly though as it is both half-term and carnival week so there are a more than usual, I suspect) but most of the shops are not open or not on a regular basis. Of course that ignores the fact that spain (and france) do not do shops and shopping like we do. Napoleon nearly got it right - we ARE a nation of shopkeepers but also a nation of shoppers unlike anywhere else in Europe. I think ex-city euroland basically dislikes shopping and the shopkeepers collude in this by opening at such weird times as to make it as difficult as possible.

So Isla Cristina looks like it is suffering badly in the hard times afflicting spain. Off the main streets there is much decay and deriliction. Lots of men and youths standing around doing nothing and lots of closed down businesses and a general air of depression............which made the scale of the carnival on Sunday even stranger and the Burial Of The Sardine Parade and fireworks on Wednesday night even more incomprehensible than it might otherwise have been.

FRIDAY......and then we cycled through the saltpans & marshes to AYAMENTO which just proved all the above wrong. Lovely vibrant town, bustling with tourists and shops everywhere and I even bought a shirt. Lovely lunch and brilliant cycle ride with flamingos, spoonbills, herons, cranes, storks, curlew, snipe, avocets, stilts, godwits, plovers and that's just the ones we can now recognise.

MISSION STATEMENT AND THE GF IS UNWELL

February 21st 2012

The adverse comments left after the last post have caused me to review and recalculate the whole raison d'etre of this blog which was only started after pressure from offspring who expressed a desire to know where we were and which replaced the daily journals which I used to write as a diary of our travels. Those journals which now number many notebooks were written up each evening with a glass of wine and rambled on with what we had seen and done that day and contained the minutiae of travels in a motorhome and the trials and tribulations of daily living.

The Blog has changed that, as I now write it up every once in a while since I can't be bothered to get the computer out each night. The posts contain a lot less than the journals ever did, and far less detail of places visited, simply because I can write faster than I can type and I get bored with typing. I am also conscious that other people read it, which was never really intended with the journals (not whislt we were living, anyway) and have become increasingly dissatisfied with the thought that I now try to find 'interesting' things to share with a wider audience rather than describe the problems of replacing the roof-light winding mechanism which I did last week;the efforts to stop the water tank overflow pipe from syphoning fresh water;the investigations into the erratic behaviour of the battery charging system and the solar panel;the day spent with Paul sourcing a cheap battery charger in Conil & rigging up an alterative charging system for him;the hilararious games of boules;the fun Roy and I had trying to convince an LPG depot to replace the Cepsa gas bottle with a Repsol cylinder since Cepsa is only available in Spain not Portugal whilst Repsol is available in both ( I only discovered this last year when needing a new Cepsa gas bottle and vowed to rectify it this year) and we only managed to persuade the manager after taking an interest in the dozen Goldfinches he had in tiny cages staked out in his garden as lures for other finches which he caught with a net;the discovery that some Terry's brandy bottles are 36% and some with identical labels and prices are only 30% and you have to check very carefully as they are all togther;the english hippies we are parked next to at Isla Christina with the requisite number of tattos and piercings,two dogs called Tequila & Tia Maria, who have been parked there for 18 months, are leaving for Bulgaria in October for a job offer and who are a wonderful source of information and have been very helpful;the apparent demise of my ereader;details of the many fascinating people we have only met for a short while (Harry who played in then coached the GB Water-polo team)

....and those are just a few omissions that spring to mind as I type with time on my hands.....

To those who posted the comments I can only say that a straw-poll of other followers produced a 100% positive response - thank you, William -(who,incidently, spotted the point of the article and went straight to the nub of the matter by highlighting the ridiculous situation whereby the Spanish can ignore EU legislation unilaterally at their leisure. The Portuguese tolls will be of interest, I am sure, to Derek & Margaret who are heading down to meet up with us at Olhao and who may not have been aware of the situation.........

The GF has just read the above and told me to go back to writing in the notebooks so I am going to have to reconsider my position.

(the GF says he is a pompous git !!)

And now to the latest news..........

We left Conil after the Valentines Night Dinner Dance which was raucous rather than romantic and great fun with a Spanish blues band..

Headed down to Tarifa in bright sunshine which turned to rain when we got there. Didn't like the campsite we were headed for & the GF didn't like the wild camping spot on the beach full of German windsurfers in beaten-up ancient Hymers and VW-campers so went into the town and had lunch in a car-park overlooking the Straits to north Africa and the Atlas mountains whilst we thought out plan C.There was a very nice looking campsite just outside the town on the beach but when we got there the wind was blowing hard (as it usually does in this, the southern-most point of Europe where the Atlantic meets the Med.) and the GF who is still not 100% decided we should push on back up to Isla Cristina which we did. Rain stopped, sunshine returned and arrived at Camping Giralda without mishap about 5pm. Site similar to Fuzeta last year, ACSI €16 a night with 12 nights for price of 11.Only about 15 kms from Portuguese border adjacent to beach which stretches for miles. Site very busy and all best pitches in the sun taken by long-stay dutch & german plus one english van as above. Other pitches are under the pines and will be best pitches in the summer. Lots of permanent spanish shanty-town caravans which fill up at weekends with wonderfully noisy spanish families who arrive en masse....this week is local Carnival and half term.

The GF still not recovered from bad throat so by sunday we bit the bullet and got a taxi to local health clinic where we saw a doctor with 2 minutes and with much thumbing through the Berlitz Useless Phrase Book, gesticulation and method acting I think we conveyed the gist of the problem. Industrial strength paracetamol were dispensed and a prescription for a codeine linctus issued. We had timed it right as when we returned to recpetion the place was in chaos. Our french-speaking spanish taxi driver had waited for us and knew the duty pharmacy luckily and for the first time abroad a chemist asked if I had any medical cards and accepted the EHC111 in lieu of payment for the prescription with a bright smile. Unlike France. So the Gf has stayed indoors for 2 days and is getting better..............

THE GF IS UNWELL........

Last night at Conil was a very jolly Valentines night Dinner & Dance at the restaurant which was hardly romantic but enormously good fun with a rock n'roll spanish blues band who were surprisingly authentic and lots of wine was taken.

The following day we took our farewells and headed down to Tarifa where it was raining.

A-FRAMES IN SPAIN AND TOLL ROADS IN PORTUGAL

14th February 2012

2 topics of conversation:

One of the great topics of the moment is the status of A-frames. A-frames are devices mainly used by motorhomes to tow small cars behind them and are much favoured more by the british than any other nation - and manufactured by the british. Other countries tended to view them with suspicion as they ranged from a simple frame device to tow a small car with any braking system and only a towing board with lights hung on the back to super sophisticated systems with wireless telemetry to activate brakes & lights. Eventually a standard was established and they were tolerated abroad but mainly because an EU ruling said that any device that was legal in the country of registration would be recognised as legal throughout member states. Consequently, all owners of A-frames carried with them the translations of their units legality as provided by the manufacturer and we have witnessed tow-ers being harassed by the Spanish Policia Traffico at service staions and kept hanging about for a long time whilst their documentation is studied minutely. And everybody we know with an A-frame has been stopped in Spain at least once.So you can imagine the consternation when it was discovered last month via an article on the Madrid embassy website(which is most informative for travellers) that the Spanish authorities had at last decided, unilaterally in the EU, that A-frames were illegal and could not be used in Spain, wherever you originated from. There are at least a dozen A-framers here alone, who now face (and this could be urban myth) 1.heavy fines 2.Heavy fines and tow-car impounded 3.all the previous plus motohome impounded 4. all the previous plus the spanish inquisition and eventual death by public burning to compensate for the banning of bull-fighting in some areas.

The people already here have to make the choice of returning home and hoping they won't get caught,buying a trailer or teaching their wives to drive a small car or a motrohome. It's a great source of amusement for those of us who could not afford to bring a small car..............

The Portuguese started an enormous program to introduce tolls on the motorway network last year. We saw toll booths being built last year for the proposed introduction on 1st April but it was obvious this would not be completed on time. They did however introduce tolls on Dec 1st and the system is chaotic by all accounts. Even the Portuguese don't know what the regulations are and the Govt. website was certainly incomprehensible on the matter when I looked before departing. There appears to be nowhere at the start of the motorway on the spanish border to purchase the correct vignette, day pass,week pass, or monthly pass or 'hire' the black box for the cab of motorhomes over 3.5t (us). People are being told to go to the nearest Post Office and stories of 3-4 hour waits have been verified by frustrated tourists who tried -unsuccessfully- to become legal. So everybody is avoiding the motorways as (urban myth) stories abound of huge instant fines and impounding of vehicles. We are heading into Portugal on 1st March and have usually used the motorway but we can avoid it and would have done so now without the chaos as we don't have far to go. The problem is that everbody is avoiding the motorway, even the Portuguese, and the already really crappy road that is the N145 is now the really busy crappy N145, with potholes like dustbin lids and a surface like corrugated iron.......

Brief Encounters .......

February 11th 2012

After the great weather we are now in a spell of clear blue skies and sunshine with extremely cold temperatures overnight or if the wind starts blowing as it is from the north. Last weekend saw some bitter winds and most of Europe including northern Spain was experiencing freezing conditions. Snow seemed to cover most places even down to La Manga but the wind was the killer. We went out a couple of times and the Gf ended up with sinus trouble and a cough ( of which there is a lot of around here) and took to her bed on Monday.She is still not 100% but was up and about by Tuesday, only missing out on the Buffet in the restaurant on monday which was jolly, even without her.

As well as whist which we still play on Thursdays, we have re-learnt Canasta with Harry & Joan, along with the sweetly named Shithead which is a fun card game much loved by students and the rules of which I had downloaded from the net but not played until we found The above couple who knew it from their children......harry was a surveyor and has renovated what sounds like a great house in the Vendee where they now live......not far from Don & Sandra who live in the Charente - Don being a mad scotsman who has lived in france for the last 15 years, mainly Normandy, having been a translator for estate agencies selling to brits.

The quiz on Wednesday......the winners scored a very creditable 50/50; we scored 47/50 and tied for 2nd and if the Gf had known that a pearl wedding was 30 years, not 35, we would have had a straight second place and €32.

Everybody knew we were going to lose the tie-break - 'what is the running time of the film Brief Encounters ? ' I wrote 90mins. & the other team wrote 90 mins so there should have been another tie-break question but the Gf over-ruled me at the last minute and wrote 100 mins. As the predictable answer was 86 mins we came 3rd and €15 and lost another tie break which is now the source of much amusement and comment.

On thursday we had a lads day out at the Jerez race track watching F1 pre-season testing courtesy of a lift from Roy the welshman next door. Very pleasant in the sunshine watching Hamilton,Vettel and Alonso blast round a racetrack that should still be in the championship. Alonso naturally plays to the spanish crowd, sopping to milk the cheers and burn rubber to get them excited.On the way back, Roy was so busy taking the piss out of his friend Will who had taken the wrong turning on this road and ended up in the back streets of Cadiz with his motorhome that he managed to take the wrong turning and we ended up in the back streets of Cadiz and took half an hour to get out of.This caused much hysteria, especially when his wife Joy heard about it on our return as Roy had been going on about Will's error for 2 weeks.

On friday we had a delightful walk through the back lanes, joining Paul & Marianne, John & Jean & Bryan & Cissy en route to a Venta near El Colarado for lunch. Had a cracking 3 course meal with drinks for a total of €64 for 8 people which seems remarkably good value and set us up for the hours walk home.The same crowd plus others are the lets-get-pissed-at-the-sports-bar

stalwarts so friday was a very pleasant interlude.

We've now been here for 4 weeks, don't know where the time has gone and its been a laugh a minute and now thinking of moving on......or not. We shall go to Olhao on March 1st but we may go to Tarifa for a few days and then Huelva and Isla Christina before heading to Portugal.......

FINANCE AND QUIZ NIGHT.....

February 2nd 2012

For avid followers of this drivel, the good news on the Caxton Card saga ..(do keep up, it was all detailed in the post of Jan 18th)..is that the money has finally been returned as I deem it, or no longer put aside as pending as they would explain it. The strange thing is that they told me it could take up to 16 days, a strange number, and lo and behold,it popped back into the available balance exactly 16 days after it had been removed. So how did they know it would take 16 days unless Shell had told them it would reverse the pending request in 16 days and if so did Shell or Caxton have use of that money in the meantime ? It's not just Caxton, who expressly warn of automated fuel pumps, car rental firms and hotels who want to swipe a card at reception, as I noticed a Carrefour pending charge of €120 remained on a debit card for 7 days after using a pay-at-the-pump last year(the card being debited with the actual fuel purchased immediately but the sum for the total amount of fuel that could have been purchased ie €120, being sent as a pending request and reducing my available balance......wake up at the back, questions will be asked....I think that this is a big issue as in certain circumstances it could mean that you cannot withdraw funds as these pending requests effectively block legitimate access to your account. And with the Shell garage episode this was not a pending charge in case the funds were not cleared but a commuincations error that sent 3 requests for the same transaction. Are we being ripped off again by the retailers and card issuers

or merely grossly inconvenienced ?

And the news that all are waiting for, it being the night after the Quiz...

Well, 30 teams last night, 120 people. We scored 44/50 and irritatingly knew the answers to 5 of the questions we got wrong, but argued over which were the correct ones. And I have to hang my head in shame at plumping for Graham Hill after crossing out Mike Hawthorn as first British F1 champion (well there was only 4 years between them) and what made it more galling was that the Good Fairy kept wittering on about Hawthorn and is now looking very smug and sniggering every few minutes. This meant that we came second after 45 won the top prize of €60 and had to settle for €40. But as was pointed out, if we'd tied again for 1st we'd still have lost it on a tie break so we repaired to the bar to spend our winnings...........

Weather continues to be exceedingly sunny and warm, and a mass electric bike ride-out...including a home-converted electric tandem....resulted in such ribald comments as Hell's Grandparents and brought terror and confusion to the local countryside.