The photo I wished I'd had the guts to take!

Tonight, the 6 of us sat around a rough, wooden table in a small, local bar with a bottle of the house red and the smallest wine glasses you've ever seen. There were a couple of elderly gentleman sat at the bar, nursing cold beers and at another table were a group of young women, catching up on all the news from the last few days over a few drinks, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke, as smoking is still allowed in bars here.

Nothing untowards about any of this. A normal Saturday night in a small, Spanish town.

Except this wasn't a normal night. This was Carnival night.

So at the far end of the bar, served a couple of beers by the barman, sat 2 clowns. Full, brightly coloured costumes, funny wigs & hats and more make-up than you would find at the Revlon counter in any branch of 'Boots'.

I wish I'd had the nerve to ask them for a photo - it looked so bizarre and yet no-one even took a second glance. Beer glasses drained, they once more attached their bright, red noses and went out to join the rest of the parade.

We followed them outside the bar as we could hear music playing and the street was filled with chefs with rather large, fake stomachs protruding from rather short jackets.

There was a whole crowd of kids dresed in 'hippy' clothes from the 60's

And they had the most brilliant car that about a dozen of them were carrying around.

There were people in medieval costumes and and group of ladies with red feather boa's and fishnet tights - I think they were all supposed to be Charlston Girls, but the fact they all had big, outdoor, winter coats on rather spoilt the effect.

Velez Blanco is a small town and there were not many people standing on the street corners to watch as the parade passed by as most of them were in it, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves, and we certainly enjoyed watching them in all their finery. It was a short parade, it only took a few minutes to pass us by. No where near the scale of the Carnival Parades that will take place in Aguilas in the next couple of weeks, but it was fun.

But, how I wished I'd taken a photo of the clowns sat drinking in the bar!

Hey, Ho. Maybe next year!

Rubio's carnival starts next week and, we're told, has a much bigger parade - so, that's one for us to look forward to.

Carnival Season has started.

Every year in Spain, each town has their own Carnival week where there are lots of parades, lots of partying, lots of food and lots of drink. This usually happens a week or two before the beginning of lent as is where people indulge before they fast for lent.

Tonight we are off to Velez Blanco for the parade. It's an early parade, starts about 7pm (ish) but we're going through a little earlier as it will be really busy and parking could be a problem as Velez Blanco has such narrow streets.

All being well, I'll have some stories and some photos to post tomorrow. Now, I'm off to dress very warmly as the nights are still very cold and we'll be stood about outside for quite some time.

Our own Carnival starts next week, so more partying and more eating & drinking. Life can be really tough at times!

After 4 months, our kitchen is finally finished.

When Neil got home from golf yesterday, I told him we needed to drive down to Almeria, again, to swap the handle for the right one.

As we would (hopefully) only be on the store for 10 minutes, we decided to take the dogs with us so, we settled them on the back seat as normal, made sure we had the wrong handle and the receipt and started out on yet another trip to Almeria.

The store was relatively quiet when we arrived and I managed to speak to someone at Customer Services straight away. I explained what was wrong and she told me to go to the kitchen section and she would send someone over. 10 minutes later, I was back at Customer Services as we hadn't seen anyone to speak to. Neil by this stage was ready to help himself to a handle and leave, but I tend to be a little more patient and want to do things right - my days of running out of stores and across carparks are well and truly behind me (not that I used to, but I couldn't if I wanted to now - oh, you know what I mean!)

Eventually, after another 10 minutes, the guy we saw on Saturday, that was so pleased to be able to give us our final doors, walked towards us - looking anything but happy.

I explained the problem and he kept telling me the door's were all correct. It took me a while to make him understand that the doors WERE all correct, but one of them had the wrong handle, which I had in my hand! Doh, my spanish isn't that bad!

After a few more minutes, he seemed to finally grasp the problem and told me he would check if they had any spare handles to our kitchen and climbed up to a display on the higher level and started rooting through a drawer. It would seem they have a drawer full of orphaned handles - one of which was for our kitchen. Success.

He told us to take the right handle and the wrong handle back to Customer Services to make the exchange. When we did, Customer Services couldn't have looked less interested and so we left, quickly. We had our handle. If the paperwork wasn't correct for them, it certainly wasn't our problem.

So, an hour and 15 mins later, back at home and the new handle was in place. Finally, the kitchen was complete.

We accept that we have fitted a lot of units and that it was unlikely that Brico Depot would have enough in for us on our first visit. We accept that a 2nd visit was not unreasonable to collect the missing items that had been ordered for us.

What we find frustrating is that on the 2nd trip, they only had the cupboards and none of the doors.

On the 3rd trip we only collected half of the doors because they had ordered 10 doors expecting them to come in pairs, and they didn't. We actually needed 20 doors.

We then needed a 4th trip because the doors didn't come wth hinges, we needed to buy them seperately! (But nobody had mentioned it).

The 5th trip was to collect more doors, but they still hadn't all come in.

So, Saturday was the 6th trip closely followed by a 7th for the handle.

Each trip takes half a tank of deisel at €50 per tank.

Each trip takes an hour and 15 minutes - each way.

I reckon we have done 5 trips more than should have been necessary so that's 12.5 hours of driving and €250 in fuel. Plus it's taken 4 months to finally get a finished kitchen.

People keep telling me things take time in Spain - but I think this is taking it to extremes.

Welcome home, Brian.

He's back.

After major surgery he runs like a youngster.

A 13 year old car with a 6 year old engine.

Fingers crossed that the bodywork can take the new energy levels.

As I drove him up the mountain road, his engine purred along in 4th gear and still had something to give.

It wasn't a cheap repair, but was cheaper than a new run around.

Hopefully, I'll have many happy kilometers with him now.

Welcome home, Brian!

Will our kitchen ever be complete?

I love the kitchen we have chosen, I love the handles.

It took us a long time to find the kitchen with the right look, and eventually we did - in Brico Depot in Almeria. This is a flat pack kitchen you fit yourself but it was exactly what I wanted so we were prepared for the hard work.

In October we got half the cabinets and a few of the doors. We had to order the rest.

In November we got the remaining cabinets and half of the remaining doors

And finally, on Saturday we were able to collect the last 8 doors we needed to complete our kitchen. 7 doors went on beatifully but the last door let us down. Right door - wrong handle!

Now, it's over an hour drive each way to the store so this morning I rang them in the hope they would post the right handle out to us and I could post this one back to them, but no, we have to go to the store to exchange them. So, it looks like we have another trip tonight as I don't want to leave it too long and find they've sold out of the doors and we have another month to wait, although Neil has said if necessary he'll take a screwdriver with him and take a handle off the display kitchen.

So, in the meantime our kitchen looks really good ...........

...........except for this temporary 'handle'.

Hey, ho!

I love surprises.

After 2 days of being snow bound, this morning we HAD to get out of the house, get the car out and get to town. HAD to because all 6 gas bottles were empty, the last one ran out sometime between 2am and 5am this morning. Although we have our tank, as yet it is still empty and we have no chance of getting it filled until all the snow has gone.

The sky was clear this morning, the sun was showing above the hills and the thaw was definitely happening, but it was going to take some time to thaw 8 inches of frozen snow.

The car was still covered in a thick layer of frozen snow which took us 15 minutes to chip off, then having loaded the car with 6 empty gas bottles, a shovel and a large tub of sand & grit we set off to see whether we could get up 400m of snow covered frozen dirt track - just about all up hill.

We had arranged to pick up our neighbours who couldn't get their car out this morning and I could see them standing on the hill, watching to see whether we would make. Neil was driving, there is no way I was going to try it, after all on one side of the track is a hill and the other a long drop - any deviance from a straight line was going to be trouble.

As we drove away from the house we have the steepest part of the drive to negotiate and to my surprise, the car got up there with very little difficulty and no slipping. Then we rounded a corner, the path was in shadow and the wheels started to spin and go nowhere. A few minutes of digging and a couple of shovels of grit and the car managed to make more progress. I walked along behond ready to leap into action with shovel & grit. I noticed that Kanet & Graham were no longer watching and assumed they had realised we would make it and had started to walk to meet us. I would find out later I couldn't be more wrong!

I could feel the snow melting but underneath was a layer of ice 2 inches thick so it was slow progress. There were a couple more stops but then we were over the worst, and the car seemed to settle. I jumped in and we managed to get to the end of our track and meet the tarmac road where the snow plough had been. A few minutes later were at our neighbours who, I discovered,having watched us get stuck a couple of times were convinced we would never make it and had gone to see whether they could dig there car out instead. All morning Janet just kept saying 'I can't believe you made it!' but we're made of tougher stuff, after all we're mountain people now.

The roads to Velez were clear and the town didn't have a sign of a single snowflake but all around the mountain tops were covered.

We feel a lot better now we have 6 full gas bottles, the majority of the snow has melted although there is enough to cause us problems in the morning if it freezes tonight, but we have a week of sunshine and double figure temperatures forecast so by the weekend we should be back to rolling, green hills and our first experience of being snowed in will be well and truly behind is.

While we were in town we called at the Post Office and that's where we got our surprise. A large box from our friends in California. Inside we had some very thick, warm socks - for the bad weather!, a lovely ornament and a jar of Andy's rub. Andy has perfected his rub over many years, and it is fabulous on BBQ meat. Recently he has started marketing it and he had sent us a jar over. When we opened it, the smell reminded us of our time in California with them. Of our wedding, which they held in their garden for us and did a hge BBQ party with huge pieces of beef coated in Andy's rub. Such a fabulous box of gifts and so unexpected - they'd even sent us the few Euro's they'd had left after their trip here last Autumn, so we were all able to have a coffee on them.

Thanks guys, loved it!

Check out Andy's Rub at http://www.andysrub.com/

Now we know what it's been like in the UK!

At 6am each morning Brinkley wakes me to go out. Now, it's normally still pitch black at 6am, so I open the front door just wide enough for him to get through and while he's out I make a coffee to take back to bed. Brinkley will paw at the door to get back in, and I again open it just wide enough to let him in and to keep out the cold weather and we all go back to bed for another couple of hours.

Yesterday morning when I let him back in - he was covered in snow. Now, this wasn't forecast. Heavy rain was forecast with snow above 1500m (we're at 1000m). After towelling him dry I peeked out of the door to see a light covering of snow on the car, pretty much like previous occasions, so I closed the door and went back to bed.

A couple of hours later, I knew we had a fair amount of snow as the tv signal started to break up on ITV, indicating the satellite dish was probably filling up with snow. Neil very chivalrously offered to don big boots and dressing gown and went up onto the roof terrace to clear the dish.

That was when we realised this was not snow like before. This was snow of mega-proportions. This was 'snowed in for the day' snow. It was 6 inches deep and still falling. We decided we would go back to bed for another hour as we wouldn't be going anywhere today.

By 10am the snow was over 8 inches deep, the dogs were struggling to walk through it and were jumping like tiny deer. Brandy was desperately looking for somewhere to pee, but the snow was upto his willie and he couldn't work out what to do!

We both decided to shower and then have breakfast and literally, as the last egg was finishing cooking - the power went off, then came back on, then went off again. After a few more on-off moments, it went off for good.

We kicked the calor gas fire into action to keep the house warm, and as we have a gas hob which doesn't require electric we were alright for cooking.

We decided to clear a little of the snow away to make an area that the dogs could walk and do what they needed to do, with out the snow freezing their little what'sits off, and then, as we still had no power, out came the cards and dominoes.

One thing about living close to your neighbour is that you can always check if their power is on/off too, or if it's just you. Here, well, we have a real hike to our neighbours through deep snow but with no electric, no phone, there was little alternative. So, at mid-day we got all our waterproof golfing gear out and started the trek up the hill.

By now it had started to warm up a little and the snow had turned to rain. I was so tempted to turn back, it was really difficult to walk uphill through snow which at times was upto our knees as it had drifted. The rain was heavy and blowing into our faces, but we decided to continue. We had plenty off layers on, we were in waterproofs and it had taken about half an hour to get dressed to leave the house - we were going to continue!

I have to say, if I thought the walk to the ruin on Sunday was hard work, it was a stroll in the park compared to walking through deep, fresh snow! We took several short rests on the way up but we finally made it. To say Janet & Graham were amazed is an understatement of enormous proportions. We happened to arrive just as Janet was making some Cola Cao (hot chocolate) and it was so welcome, especially after she offered to add some Brandy.

We stayed for a couple of hours and began to put all our waterproofs on again for the trek home. The whole valley looked wonderful and the walk home was easier as, in the main, it was down hill.

It was still raining and the snow was thawing rapidly. Whether it will all go before the temperature drops again tonight is anyone's guess. We are due some more rain overnight, but the snow level has been changed to 800m so if it does rain, we will get it as snow.

After 7 hours the power finally came back on, but we kept a candle lit for the rest of the evening..........just incase!

Now, be honest, how many of you though Southern Spain and Snow went together? Well, there are ski resorts around Granada - it's not all about sea & sun!