Bonus & Wendy's Big Adventure . . . .

[Bonus]

For the last few days the local news has been talking about a man who is lost up in the mountains.

 

He is Mexican, 71 years old and called Jesus (Haysuse). . . .  

 

 

Sadly I can report that yesterday searchers found the body of the missing man, Jesus.

 

He was found some distance away from the path he was supposed to be on. As yet no details of what happened / how he ended up there have emerged.

 

It's not the result anyone was hoping for. Our condolences go to his family.

 

:-(  

[Bonus]

I spoke to Ramon the friendly farmer a couple of days ago about using a little piece of his land down by the river to grow our own Salads & Veggies. He has two vegetable gardens himself - one up at the house in Guaso and one down by the Rio Ara. Ours will be next to his so that we can help each other when necessary.

 

Looking forward to growing lots of stuff next year. Everything they grow tastes so nice :-)

[Bonus]

This weekend, in fact starting last Thursday, it is "Fiesta Weekend" in Boltaña. There are street parties, bands in the evening and discos all night....

 

Typically there's a band on stage between 8pm and 10pm, then everything stops for a few hours for supper, then at 1am the dancing starts up again until 6am. They do this for 4 days straight. I say "they" because sadly I couldn't even if I wanted to! Zzzzzz

 

Tonight at midnight is the "end of weekend" firework show . . . we'll see if we can stay up that late and watch it.

 

Thankfully, because work for us has to carry on, all the party noise is some distance away from our rented apartment. The same thing goes for Guaso village where our Project is - the little Plaza is far enough away not to disturb us too much when they have their "all night parties" over their Fiesta weekend in early August.

[Bonus]

Seasonal working in Spain:

 

 

The weather here is starting to cool down a bit now as we head towards the end of Summer.

 

I've been working at the campsite for 6hrs a day, 7 days a week for nearly 5 months now and then MTB guiding in the afternoons or evenings whenever the opportunity arises. It's a lot of work but we have to earn it while we can. The campsite shuts at the end of September - it will take a few days to close it all down and then it'll just be a few days of maintenance during the off-season. I'll continue MTB guiding and start working with local farmers, including our neighbour Ramon, when they need me. . . .  

[Bonus]

The last few we few weeks have been crazy busy - and it's going to get worse over the next few days! Can't complain at having work though :-)

 

I'm still working everyday at the campsite - I thought things were going to slow down in September but now that the school holidays are finished, all the people without children are visiting and tons of them are cyclists.

 

On top of that I've been either guiding people or training / trail-finding in the afternoons and then at night after I've been back to do the campsite "evening shift" (closing down the swimming pools etc) I'm trying to keep on top of paperwork, updates, guiding enquiries . . . .

 

Today and tomorrow in the afternoons I'll be joining "Wendy", Ramon the Farmer and Rosa up at the farmhouse to stomp the grapes they've all been picking from this years harvest.

 

And on top of everything, I've made good progress translating and updating our Dept. of Commerce Viability Study so that we can use it when talking to private investors about our Project. Just need to proof-read it once more to make sure it all makes sense . . . .

 

I guess we'll sleep in December when everything is finished!

Edited September 25, 2019 by Bonus

[Bonus]

We had a couple of South Africans around for lunch the other day. A Hubber and his riding partner who were here in Spain riding the trails and taking in the sights.

 

Was interesting to catch up with how people "back home" are feeling about everything at the moment and nice to see where they were riding and what they thought of it here. 

 

:-)

[Matchstix]

We had a couple of South Africans around for lunch the other day. A Hubber and his riding partner who were here in Spain riding the trails and taking in the sights.

 

Was interesting to catch up with how people "back home" are feeling about everything at the moment and nice to see where they were riding and what they thought of it here.

 

:-)

Not to mention we got some awesome food and hospitality.!!!

[Bonus]

Not to mention we got some awesome food and hospitality.!!!

 

You're both welcome. We enjoyed it too........although I haven't forgotten that you ate my next days left-overs before they made it to the fridge!

 

:-)

[Bonus]

We had a few days of rain at the end of last week and over the weekend - first proper rain in months.

 

Once the sun came back out we could see that while it was raining down where we live, it had snowed up in the Alto-Pyrenees. No snow on the Pena Montenesa yet, but will be some soon I'm sure. . . . .

 

In the meantime, we're enjoying the sunshine . . . .  :-)

 

 

 

[Bonus]

The Rugby World Cup is over - and we won! How cool is that!?

 

We were watching the matches in a Bar just down the road from where we're renting our flat here in Boltaña. The Bar opens at 10am "Spanish Time" which means anywhere between 10:15 and 10:25ish depending on "how late the guy worked the night before". Consequently we missed a couple of minutes of some of the games, but never mind - we were just very grateful that we could see them at all because they weren't on normal TV here and anyway we did get to see one full match - including the SA national anthem :-)

 

When SA played Japan we arrived at the Bar with friends, bought ourselves drinks, sat down to watch . . . and the power went off! FOR AN HOUR!!!

 

We joked that you couldn't get a more authentic feeling of being back in SA than by watching Rugby in a Pub and the power goes off. The power came back on with 10 minutes to go, so we saw the end of the game. Meanwhile we hadn't even been able to check the score on-line because cell phone coverage went down with the power. That's the first power cut we've seen in all the time we've lived here. How weird is that? Maybe I asked for it when I replied to a South African friend on Facebook who asked me if the bar we were going to had a generator and I replied "hey, we're a long way from ESKOM over here buddy!"

 

Now we're enjoying the post competition humour on-line . . . . and hoping that the good feeling we have now lasts for a little while . . . . 

 

Well done to everyone.

 

Tony & Andrea

Edited November 4, 2019 by Bonus

[Bonus]

Fifteen minutes south of Ainsa, on the road to Barbastro, you drive through the "new" village of Mediano which sits alongside the Mediano Dam. This new village was built when the Mediano Dam was built and the valley containing the "old" village of Mediano was flooded.

 

Back in 2016 at the end of the summer (mid October) we drove down to new Mediano and walked from the car park across the fields to the remains of the old village. The houses have all fallen down over the years but the church tower remains standing.

 

This year we wanted to go back for another walk but the first rains came before we had the chance, so when we got there the water level had already risen.

 

When the dam is full you can only see the top couple of meters of the tower, but by then you can't get close enough to take a decent  picture unless you hire a kayak!

 

The first two pics are from 2016, the rest are from last week . . . . .

 

:-)   

Edited November 9, 2019 by Bonus

[Bonus]

We've suddenly slipped into Winter!

 

Spring was amazing - in June I was riding until after 10pm and it hadn't got dark yet!

 

Summer was amazing - up to 43 degrees at times in August, swimming in the local river, big salads for lunch every day - perfect.

 

Autumn..... well, it lasted 2 minutes! October was nice, in fact it was very comfortable after the heat of summer, but then at the beginning of November the rains arrived and temps started to fall. Now the rain has gone and it's sunny during the day - warm even if you happen to be out in it, but at night and inside the flat (which, like South African houses, is designed for summer not winter) it is freezing! 

 

We'll be ok after we adjust ourselves a bit - dig out the winter clothes and riding kit and the hot water bottles - and if it snows then the cold will be forgiven, because it really is beautiful here when it snows, but for the moment while we pay our respects to the passing of Summer, the cold is a bit.... shocking!!!  Brrrrrr

 

:-)

[Bonus]

You may have gathered from some of our posts that the region where we live - in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees - is strewn with abandoned or almost abandoned villages.

 

The two main reasons for this are firstly the relocation of much of the rural population into the towns and cities by Franco leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War and more recently the natural migration of people, specifically youngsters, moving to places with better work opportunities.

 

Pretty much every ride I go on takes me past at least one abandonded village or farm house and they've become so much a part of the landscape I'm used to that I'm no longer surprised by them - although I still find them intriguing!

 

The current government, in conjunction with local councils in our area are making an effort to encorurage people to move back into these villages, some of which are high in the mountains and consequently failry remote. Modern access roads and electricity & water supplies are all being put in and in some cases funding is being made available for renovation projects.

 

Guaso, where our Project is, doesn't fall into the "abandonded" category, but we're making enquiries with the local department of commerce just in case the option for funding or a low rate loan might be available.

 

You never know!

Edited November 28, 2019 by Bonus

[coppi]

Lots of similar villages in Italy like that, I plan to buy in the next few years, specifically Sardegna

[Bonus]

Tomorrow we'll be doing some volunteer work at the Ainsa Red Cross (Cruz Roja) office.

 

There are probably 50 odd volunteers all told, and by all trying to do a bit each, no one ends up doing too much. 

 

Tomorrow we'll be driving the Red Cross van out to some small villages and dropping off EU Food parcels to people who need them.

 

No matter how tough life gets, or how bad off you think you have it - and believe me we both have our "moments", there are always people worse off than you.

 

:-) 

[Bonus]

I've just posted this on our "Private Investment" thread. I'll copy it here for anyone who's interested but isn't following the other thread . . . . :-)

 

 

Our first little excursion into looking for a potential Private Investor on-line has now come to an end and although we haven't found an investor, we have learned a few useful things going through the process.

 

We tried out with the Angel Investment Network which advertised "Free Registration" and "access to 225,987 potential investors". I filled in all the sections of the online application form, giving details of our project, our business plan, our viability study and ourselves etc etc and at the end of several hours of work, was ready to "Publish our Pitch". Once you publish the pitch it has to be approved by the AIN before being given a Live status.

 

On clicking the "Publish" button, you are taken to a page that offers you various Paid options that enable you to enhance your pitch. Prices for the additional options range from $150 to $2500. Since this is our first attempt and we're really just finding our way here, I didn't choose to enhance our pitch. I clicked "continue" and was taken to a second Paid options page which informed me that the free option, which I was currently signed up for, did have certain limitations on it...

 

Several important sections of our pitch would be blanked out and therefore not available for potential investors to see, our acompanying pictures/photos would not be included with the pitch, the pitch would only be sent to a fraction of the available potential investors and our pitch would be sent out as an "Anonymous Pitch" - meaning investors would have to open it and read it to see what it was about, rather than being told in advance for example that it was a property development. 

 

I understand that everyone is tyring to make money here and that you don't get anything for nothing, so I won't run the company down for their "bait and switch" methods, and I kept a "copy & paste" copy of all the text I filled in - so I won't have to type everything out "longhand" again the next time we go through this process.

 

I say our "first little excursion has now come to an end" because one of the other limitations to the Novice Package is that the Pitch is archived after 30 days and if you want to republish it, you have to pay to do so.

 

I doubt that this exercise will result in us hearing from a potential investor, the limitations the company place on the free option are just too crippling. Of course its designed like that - again, I understand.

 

It's a shame because I'd happily have paid the company a finders fee if we'd been successful.

 

Anyway, onwards and upwards. I believe we have a good idea and we've bought ourselves a great property and I'm nothing if not optimistic!