Gas Bottles.

We now have a lovely, warm, cosy house. It’s great getting up in the morning and not having to run to the bathroom and back. It great coming in at night after working outside all day and although it’s only a couple of weeks, it’s seems and age since we had no heating or hot water.

But we won’t have our large tank of LPG for another 3 weeks (or maybe more) so in the meantime we needed to get 4 small bottles of gas to keep us going until the big tank arrives. The problem is over here, we need a contract and it’s not really worth all the hassle for a few weeks.

Manolo, a guy we have been getting a lot of help from at the plumbers merchant, had told us to go to a certain shop in the town, explain the situation and see if they would give us the bottles ‘sin contracto’ – without a contract.

‘No way’ was the answer, and he sent us to another place in town that was a distributor for the company. So we set off to find this distribution centre, with expectations of some sign indicating there whereabouts but there was nothing. We looked all around the area but couldn’t find anything.

We had to drive out to the Poligono anyway, so we called into the plumber’s merchant to see if they could give us any hints. Elizabeth was very helpful and it turns out we were looking for a house, no signage, no indication, no hints – just a house across the road from a bar.

We returned to town and found the bar. Across the road, sure enough, was a house with a large garage at the side. We could see an elderly man through the doorway who seemed to be fixing a chainsaw and beside him we could see a couple of bottles of gas. Either we were in the right place or we were about to ask a senior citizen if we could buy his gas bottles from him.

I politely said hello and explained what we were looking for and he stood up, went to the bottom of some stairs and shouted up to someone. A couple of minutes later a younger lady (probably his daughter) came down and I explained our situation to her, stressing the ‘sin contracto’ part several times. A few minutes later she had made a couple of phone calls and a wagon pulled up outside with our desired gas bottles on the back.

We paid a deposit for each bottle plus the normal cost of the gas and the bottles were loaded into the back of our car. No contract, no paperwork, just a receipt for us to take back when we return the bottles so we can get our deposit back.

Not strictly by the book but at least we’ll have enough gas to keep us going until the tank arrives – you just have to know how to get round the system.