Idle Thoughts

By the end of the first week of my long stay in November 2006, my water supply had been reconnected and I had an undertaking that someone would eventually turn up to install a new electricity meter. Until then I was using the generator I had brought from the UK. The deluge that had soaked the area the previous month was gradually drying out and the couple of mysterious fruit trees on my land seemed to have a bumper crop of whetever it was they produced.

Soon after I arrived I got a visit from one of the people who had worked on extending the bathroom and office earlier in the year. Tim and partner Janet have a house in nearby Zujar, which they let out and visit from time to time. Partly for social reasons and occasionally to perform some maintenance or landlord-type chores (such as collecting the rent) for the tenant. As they happened to be passing they dropped by the house, not knowing that I had come back over, as it was nearly on their way back home. Much to my surprise I remembered their names. Over the obligatory hospitality we caught up on the happenings in the area - where had all the rain come from? how was the building work holding up? how long are you staying? and so on. I explained that I had brought a vanload of furniture, telescopes and a BIG satellite dish over and that I was planning to stay for a month. On the topics of satellite dishes and telescopes I mentioned that some of my tasks were to lay a couple of concrete slabs: one to mount the dish and the other as a base to stand my telescope on. Over another beer, Tim and I came to a deal - since he was a builder and would have a few days free in the coming weeks, he could do the concrete work and give me a hand getting the dish assembled.

The end result was two concrete slabs, both about 1 metre square. The slab for the satellite dish was sited behind the corral, where the dish would be discretely out of the way and wouldn’t draw unwanted attention from passers-by. The slab for the telescope was built above the house, on the hill that the cave was dug out from. I ran some power and networking cables from the office up to this location.

The dish

Installing the satellite dish threw up a few surprises. Apart from the big dish, I had brought over a smaller (90cm) dish that I pointed at some different satellites. The plan was to pick up spanish TV on this dish and use the big one for UK TV. The small dish was quite easy to set up - partly due to its smaller size and partly because the signal from these satellites (being aimed at Spain, rather than the BBC signal with is not) is a lot stronger. The big dish was a whole different matter. Due to its size (2.4 metres/8 feet diameter) it is sold as a kit, so the first job after laying the concrete base, was to assemble all the pieces. The bottom framework is fairly straightforward, but the dish itself is definitely a two-man task. Tim and I decided that the best approach was to assemble the 6 struts that radiate from the centre and then attach the “petals” that make up the curved part of the dish itself. We did this so that we wouldn’t have to manhandle the entire assembled dish onto its base as it is both heavy and unwieldy. The assembly process went without incident and was rather like an oversized Meccano set, bolting together pre-holed sections. Once the dish was up, the hard part was to get it to point at the specific satellite that carried british programming.

I had arrived with a satellite finder. This is a piece of equipment with a meter on the front that indicates the strength of the satellite signal you are receiving. Sadly, it doesn’t tell you if you’re receiving signals from the correct satellite. Apart from pointing the dish in left-right and up-down directions, it is also necessary to have the LNB (that “catches” the signal and pipes it to your receiver) the correct distance from the dish - at it’s focus and to have the LNB rotated in its carrier at just the right angle. This amounts to 4 variables: all of which have to be just right to get the best signal, or any at all given that UK TV signals are so weak in southern Spain - 1000 miles from where they are intended to be beamed.

After a few hours of adjusting everything, I was getting twitches ono the satellite finder, indicating I was receiving a signal. Run up to the office and use the TV card in the PC to scan for signals: Al Jazeera and some other arabic stations. must be a different satellite. Back down to the dish and push it around a bit more until I got another signal on the satellite finder. What I found was that there are a lot of TV satellites up there. Much later that day I got lucky on one adjustment and found a channel broadcasting Sky News, so I had found the right satellite. Strangely, I couldn’t get any of the familiar broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4) that I was expecting, still with 4 variables that needed toall be right simultaneously I was optimistic that it was just a case of a bit of tweaking. After a week of on-and-off fiddling, I was beginning to doubt this strategy.

In the meantime, my brother and sister-in-law (John and Jane) came over for a visit. They live full-time in France and had decided that mid-November would be a good time for a road-trip. Consequently they had driven down, through France and Spain, and ended up in Baza: the nearest town of any size. I was sort-of expecting them, although not for a few days, when Mum phoned one morning to tell me they had arrived in Baza the previous night and could I phone them to give them directions. When we met up, I found out that they had been leaving increasing fraught messages on my british mobile (which was now hosting my spanish SIM, so I didn’t get them until I put the UK SIM in when I got off the ferry in Plymouth in December) and had called Mum in a last-ditch attempt to contact me. This was another occasion when I learned something new about this part of Spain.

That evening we all headed out for a meal. First stop Benamaurel, as it’s the first village you come to on the road to anywhere from my house. There were a couple of bars open, but the only establishment that pases for a restaurant was closed. Next into Baza, where they had stayed the previous night. After parking in the centre of the town, we looked around for places to eat and discovered that on a Wednesday night in November there’s precisely nothing open. Now “nothing” is a fairly strong word. There were plenty of bars open, some even had tables in them and signs outside claiming to be “cafe-bar”s. However, there wasn’t anybody in any of these places who actually had any food in front of them - yes, you can get tapas with a beer or glass of wine, but that’s a lot of booze to get through when what you really want is a meal. Some informal research in days to come gave me a couple of leads, but at the time it looked like we’d be going hungry. As I mentioned, I was not expecting John and Jane to arrive for a few more days, so I was a bit low on food back at the house. In the end it’s amazing what a bit of hunger-induced ingenuity can produce. One result of this visit was that Jane identified my mystery fruit trees as quinces (a form of rudimentary apple) and took a large load of them back to France. I was duly rewarded for my generosity at christmas, when they gave me half a dozen jars of quince jelly - complete with labels showing a picture of the very tree that had produced it.

After John and Jane left, to continue their tour of southern Spain, I got back to my satellite dish. Time was getting on and there were not many days left until my ferry back to Plymouth. At first my adjustment regime was to make a tweak, then go back into the office to see if the reception from the TV card in my PC had improved. This quickly got tedious as it’s a long walk, just for a millimetre or two’s movement in the dish. Plan B was to take the PC and monitor outside and position it close by while I made small adjustments to one of the may movable parts. In the end I got a combination that seemed to be as good as I was going to get, although I was still disappointed with the quality of the signal: only the PC could get a picture, which frequently broke up or froze, my digibox and TV never showed the slightest glimmer of anything.

My conclusions about the satellite dish pretty much brought my November trip to an end. I was booked on the Monday ferry from Santander at 15:00 and given my experiences on the drive down (see: week 1) I had decided to drive up through the night. So it was that I spent the preceding Sunday packing up the van and closing down the house. I planned to leave at midnight and to stay on the motorways for the trip to the north coast. I did make one change to this plan as the A92 motorway from Baza to Granada goes over the Sierra Nevada mountains and turns south. Instead I took an “A” class road from Gaudix to cut the corner off this section of motorway, to pick up the main motorway towards Madrid. The drive back was, fortunately, uneventful and I arrived at Santander ferryport 13 hours after I had set out, only to be informed that the ferry was cancelled due to bad weather.

Santander

When I got to the port, there were quite a lot of prospective passengers milling around the information desk. The staff were quite sympathetic and had prepared some notes for us. Briefly the choices I had were to drive up through the rest of Spain, into France and try to get a ferry from one of the Channel ports or I could rebook on the next ferry from Santander in 3 days time. (I dismissed the idea of driving over to Bilbao, as the weather would have prevented any sailings from there, too. Plus I didn’t know which days the ferry was, or if it had any free space.) Having spent the whole night getting to the port, the one thing I did know was that I wasn’t going anywhere else that day. That meant I would not set off to France until the Tuesday morning and then have a journey of 100 miles longer than my run up through Spain - which I didn’t fancy trying to do in a single day. Running through this in my mind, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t arrive at Caen until sometime on Wednesday and even then there’d be no guarantee that the weather would have abated for the ferries to run from there, either. The alternative: to go for the Santander ferry on the next thursday was not without questions, too. The first one was whethere or not that ferry would also be cancelled. The other major question was what should I do until then? I had two choices: either drive back to Cuevas del Negro on Tuesday during the day and spend Wednesday at the house, until I had to leave to drive back to Santander - or to spend the Tuesday and Wednesday in the town itself. In the end I opted for the easy way out. With some help from the P&O staff, I booked into a Hostal (low-cost hotel) for 3 nights until the next ferry was due.

Fortunately during the next few days the weather did improve and the ferry did manage to get out of Plymouth, where it had been delayed. The crossing back on Thursday was still very rough and took much longer than the scheduled time. We arrived back in the UK on the next day, quite late, due to the late start from Santander and the slow crossing. As a result of this, I didn’t get home until the early hours of Saturday morning. Given my experiences of the original drive down through Spain at the start of the trip and the delayed and rough crossing on the way back, you would think I’d been put off the idea of taking the van on that route. As it is, in a few months I’d be back again.