Bonus Posted September 7, 2017 Share A few more . . . Grey Hubs 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 7, 2017 Share The first band of the day . . . https://youtu.be/bvLOHBCWFTs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 7, 2017 Share I love these guys! https://youtu.be/jpLhERAFmT4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 7, 2017 Share Tribal . . . . https://youtu.be/ICuko_Kiviw Loose cog, barrykm and Gen 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 8, 2017 Share Every evening I feed the moms with Ramon and then we let the babies run around in the open-sided barn for a bit while I fill the water troughs. Today I took a little video https://youtu.be/hfXWvP6i1II Gen, arcitmail, Stretched@Birth and 5 others 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 19, 2017 Share We've had a hectic last couple of weeks. It's been a combination of fun times, stressy times and plain old hard work. It takes it's toll on you, emotionally and physically, but it also motivates you to "get on" and make plans to change the bits you're not happy with . . . The next couple of posts will cover everything that's happened in the last fortnight . . . . :-) Grey Hubs, BigDL and RossW 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barrykm Posted September 20, 2017 Share Looking forward to reading them.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 20, 2017 Share Who doesn't like a Party!? "Fiesta" is Spanish for Party and here where we are we have two different types of Fiesta. The most frequent kind is the Religious Fiesta, which is held at a Hermitage - a small Chapel named after a Saint and often found on remote hilltops or tucked away in among farm buildings. Following the Mass there is always plenty of nice wine and bread to eat or, if the hermitage is on a remote hilltop - we take a picnic :-) Years ago remote hermitages were maintained by the Hermits that lived in them. Nowadays the village or the family on who's land the Hermitage lies tend to look after them. Guaso has 6 of these Hermitage Chapels and therefore 6 of these Fiestas a year, including two in August and one in September - so we've been to three in recent weeks! The second type of Fiesta is the sort of thing we're more familiar with. A "town" Fietsa starts in the afternoon with a Carnival and then has a Fun Fair, Beer stalls, Traditional Dancing, Fireworks etc etc and involves drinking and dancing in the streets. In the evening there are live bands on stages in the town Plaza and more drinking and eating. We've also been to two of these in recent weeks! For the moment we are all partied out . . . . Albatross, ZakAttak, coppi and 1 other 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 24, 2017 Share Who doesn't like to buy a new car!? When I first drove down to Spain from the UK with an old Mazda 626 full of our belongings, the plan was for the car to last 6 months. After that, if you plan on living here you have to either get yourself a Spanish car or have your UK car registered in Spain - Spanish number plates, Spanish Road Tax etc etc. Registering a foreign car is a bit pricey - maybe to encourage you to buy a local car? And in order to get our car through the Spanish version of the Road Worthy / MOT test, we would also need to replace the headlights with ones designed for driving on the Right Hand side of the road instead of the left. The whole exercise wasn't really viable with such an old car so we started looking for a second-hand Spanish car . . . . The second-hand market for cars here is not good. Cars tend to be expensive. Because so few new cars were sold during the Spanish Crisis that started in 2008, there is a "hole" in the second-hand car market. We scoured the local car sales places (of which there are not many) and the internet in an attempt to find a suitable car but, as our building planning application dragged on and on the task of finding a car got put on the back burner . . . During the summer months our foreign car was hidden among many other foreign cars here on holiday, but as the season headed towards a close we decided we really needed to get ourselves a cheap & cheerful car - that would be legal on the roads here. Eventually Wendy found a car that seemed suitable and, after some trips to the nearby town of Huesca and lots of question, we settled on a Hyundai Santa Fe It's quite old and has a fair few miles on the clock but it was affordable, came with new tyres and a new battery, it's clean and tidy and it has four wheel drive - which is essential if you live in the mountains and like to venture up paths designed for tractors! The size is taking a bit of getting used to, but the steering wheel is on the correct side and we had a tow bar fitted so that we can use our bike rack and our South African trailer. One day it would be nice to look for cars online and not have to always select the "Lowest Price First" option, but maybe that will come in time. Meanwhile, we are very happy Well done to Wendy for a good find! Spokey, Kalahari Vegmot, Albatross and 8 others 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Loose cog Posted September 24, 2017 Share Haha! We are looking at relocation to Portugal or Malaga and considering the car options. Can't believe prices for cars! Further issue is that you have to have owned the car for two years in the country you coming from to qualify to bring it in. Initially I thought I would buy a car in the Netherlands or UK and bring that in. No wonder everyone drives such skedonks. Hope to find the secondhand Vespa market better option Bonus 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 24, 2017 Share Haha! We are looking at relocation to Portugal or Malaga and considering the car options. Can't believe prices for cars! Further issue is that you have to have owned the car for two years in the country you coming from to qualify to bring it in. Initially I thought I would buy a car in the Netherlands or UK and bring that in. No wonder everyone drives such skedonks. Hope to find the secondhand Vespa market better option Very difficult to find a bargain. Hopefully ours will prove to be just that :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 29, 2017 Share We have finally started some work on our property! A few weeks ago we invited a young English couple that we met at "Learn Spanish" class in town to come and see our "Viking Hut" before going out for Pizza & Beer. They loved our place and, whilst showing them around, I explained to Ben that although we knew we couldn't start work on the actually "building" without enlisting the help of a builder, I would have been happy to start working on the sloping back garden - if it weren't for the fact that in every article I read about terracing & landscaping a sloping garden, "Step One" was to build a suitable retaining wall! The existing very dodgy 1m high wall needed to be replaced by a good strong 3.5m high stone wall (leaning back at 15 degrees). Now, this isn't something to rush into . . . You stand a chance of the existing garden "slipping" when the old wall is removed if you're not careful and then I'd be in a world of mud! To cut a long story short, Ben told me to stop being such a baby and that he'd help us get started if I got the materials ready So, here we go . . . . TIB, Albatross, Captain Fastbastard Mayhem and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted September 30, 2017 Share Had a bit of a homesick moment this morning :-( We asked to have a towbar fitted to the new car when we bought it last week. Earlier this week I unpacked and checked over the Thule bike rack we brought with us from SA and yesterday I bought a couple of new number plates. One for the bike rack and one for our trailer - which we also bought over from SA. This morning I put the bike rack on the car and tested the lights etc, then took off the old Johannesburg "GP" number plate and fitted one of my new Spanish ones. In a previous life, we would have been loading our bikes onto this exact bike rack and driving out to Northern Farm or The Cradle of Humankind for a Saturday morning ride. That thought just struck me out of the blue and for a moment I missed our old lives :-( Captain Fastbastard Mayhem and FrankG 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Fastbastard Mayhem Posted September 30, 2017 Share Had a bit of a homesick moment this morning :-( We asked to have a towbar fitted to the new car when we bought it last week. Earlier this week I unpacked and checked over the Thule bike rack we brought with us from SA and yesterday I bought a couple of new number plates. One for the bike rack and one for our trailer - which we also bought over from SA. This morning I put the bike rack on the car and tested the lights etc, then took off the old Johannesburg "GP" number plate and fitted one of my new Spanish ones. In a previous life, we would have been loading our bikes onto this exact bike rack and driving out to Northern Farm or The Cradle of Humankind for a Saturday morning ride. That thought just struck me out of the blue and for a moment I missed our old lives :-( perfectly normal, and totally understandable, Bonus. You get those instances every now and then, and it's perfectly okay to reminisce and think about "things that were" If you didn't, you'd be denying yourself a happy memory. The melancholy that comes along with the memory will fade in time, and with that the joy in the memory will increase to fill the void left by the lack of sadness. Don't dismiss it out of hand, nor castigate yourself for having feelings of regret or sadness. That's perfectly natural. Remember instead that you had oodles of good times in NF or the Cradle, but now you don't have to load up the bikes or take an extra hour to get ready, load the bikes and drive for an hour just to get somewhere that you can ride. It's all around you now... There will be happy memories, and some of them will be tinged with sadness. That's okay. But just like in the movie Inside Out, joy is nothing without sadness. Edited September 30, 2017 by Myles Mayhew Bonus, Wendy, coppi and 4 others 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bonus Posted October 2, 2017 Share Ramon the Friendly Farmer has given us permission to use as many building stones from his land as we want to, for our house. This pile used to be a sheep refuge for bad weather but it fell down sometime before he was born! So these stones have been laying here for at least 75 years and the last time people worked with them was probably around 150 years ago!I'll pick out all the useable ones :-) https://youtu.be/FIEvcLLPJMs Thankfully the stones are in the middle of nowhere! Edited October 2, 2017 by Bonus Kalahari Vegmot, BSG, RossW and 4 others 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barrykm Posted October 3, 2017 Share Nice touch to have some local history in your 'new' build. Thumbs up to Ramon. Bonus 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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