My trials and tribulations on holiday in Spain

This is my account of my first official holiday abroad since 1981. Yes, I did go abroad to Russia (3 days), and the Ukraine (2 days) in 2005. Also to Belarus on 3 occasions in 2006 and 2007. Those holidays had a purpose behind them. This was the first time I had organised a holiday for my wife, daughter, and myself to somewhere completely new to all of us. What follows are our attempts to create a memorable holiday for all of us!


First we have to go back to late November 2010 to understand why we chose Spain as our destination. Out of the blue, I received a phone call from a Company called Heritage Resorts. They offered us one weeks stay in one of their apartments at a special discounted rate of £49 in February, or £79 in April. The only date that all three of us were on holiday was April, so we decided to choose the week 16-23 April, although this would cause a problem for me immediately!


Heritage Resorts base their week from Saturday to Saturday. The Company I work for base their week from Sunday to Sunday! So on the Saturday we should be checking into the resort, I would still be at work! Worse, the shift I was doing was my late shift (14:30-22:30). We had to fly to Malaga, and the cheapest option was by Easy Jet departing from Gatwick. We decided to hire a car in Spain, so I booked a car through the website http://www.doyouspain.com/ who told us to collect the car at the airport from the rental company Record Go.

There were only 2 flights out of Gatwick available to us on the Sunday. One departed at 05:40, the other departed at 19:30. As the evening flight would not arrive at Malaga until 22:30, I was worried about driving a strange car, on strange roads, with unfamiliar road signs, at night! I chose the 05:40 flight, although it would mean I got very little sleep in the process. How little sleep, was a surprise to me, as events conspired against me to abort the holiday before it had even begun!

Now I will give a day by day account of our adventures.

It all started on Thursday 14th April. In the morning, I had to take my wife to the doctors for a blood test appointment. As I parked outside the doctors my Land Rover showed a warning light. The picture looked like a car with its doors open. We checked all the doors, but could not see anything wrong. After taking my wife back home, I had no more time to investigate the warning light that day before I had to set off for work.

Friday 15th April. When I took my wife to work in the morning, the warning light came on again. Once I got home I checked the cars operation manual and discovered that the warning light was to do with the ACE (Automatic Cornering Enhancement) system being faulty. I checked under the bonnet and discovered the ACE hydraulic fluid reservoir was very low. As I hadn't checked under the bonnet for a few months, I topped up the reservoir with fluid and then drove off to my local garage to try and get some bulbs for the dashboard that needed replacing. On the way to the garage the warning light came back on again! At the garage, a mechanic pointed out that the system was leaking fluid from a corroded pipe behind a front wheel. Now I was beginning to panic! The garage did not keep the pipes in stock, if they ordered them in, they would not arrive until Monday. To replace the pipes would take the best part of a day to do as the radiator would have to be removed first! There was no way my car could be repaired before we set out for Gatwick!
What I decided to do was stock up with loads of hydraulic fluid, and just keep topping up the reservoir frequently and hope that my car got me to Gatwick without any major mishaps!

Saturday 16th April started off OK, but once I was at work, my plans started to unravel. I was due to finish work at 22:30, and was looking forward to catching the 22:34 train home. Unfortunately my colleague was delayed getting to work and did not arrive until 22:40. To add insult to injury, the next train home at 22:54 was cancelled by London Midland. So I had to wait until 23:30 before I finally left London, heading for home. Once home, I managed to get one hours sleep before we set off to Gatwick.

Saturday morning started off relatively well. I made a single stop to top up the fluid in the car, and we arrived safely at the parking lot at Gatwick. When I handed over the car, I was asked if I wanted to have the car valeted and delivered to the airport when we arrived back. Considering the problem I have with the car, I declined the offer!

We arrived at the airport, checked in, and boarded the flight without any problems. I managed to doze for an hour during the flight. I couldn't discover how to tilt the seats back a bit so I could relax. So we arrived at Malaga at 09:30, Spanish time. I then had to go and collect the hire car. That's when the fun and games started!

It is common policy for the car hire firms to charge you for a full tank of petrol, we were charged €75 (more about that later), and they wanted to charge us an extra insurance for any damage or punctured tyres we might have. If we didn't take the insurance, we would be liable to pay €300 for any damage. The first car they gave me had the nearside mirror casing practically falling off the car. Also there was a bolt in one of the rear tyres, and one of the rear lenses was broken. Not happy with the car, I went back to the hire desk who told me to take the car down to level -2 where they would change the car. This they did, only car number 2 had a bald tyre! Car number 3 had a broken front and rear lens, and extensive body damage down the nearside! Car number 4 had another bald tyre! Finally car number 5 was all in one piece and we could begin our journey to the resort.





We arrived at our destination at the Playa Real, Marbesa, around lunch time, and collected the keys to our apartment. The complex was called El Toro, and the views from the apartment were stunning! We had been given one of the top floor apartments, so we could see the sea in one direction, and the mountains behind us. You could only gain entry to the complex via an electric operated gate. Without our keys, we couldn't get in or out! We had our own communal swimming pool to use too! It was a very spacious 2 bedroom apartment. The fixtures and fittings were of a high standard too. As soon as we unpacked we all had a 3 hour siesta! Later we went for a walk along the beach. Although it was sunny, it was very windy, keeping the temperature down. In the evening we went to a local supermarket (OpenCor) to get some milk, bread and some meat to eat. Later in the evening we went to the restaurant in the main hotel complex (Roberto's) and availed ourselves of the special offer of 2 pizzas for the price of one, shared between the 3 of us.


Monday, we went to Marbella to visit their weekly market. The weather was overcast, but still warm. The girls bought jewellery, some strawberries and tomatoes. I bought 2 leather belts. Then we visited a larger supermarket and stocked up on food for the week. Then we went back to the apartment, cooked ourselves some dinner and had an early night.


Tuesday, was very cloudy. So we decided to go to Gibraltar. Unfortunately, it was still cloudy when we got to Gibraltar. The clouds were so low, the top of the rock was into the cloud base. We walked across the runway into the town. Had a stroll through the shopping precinct before taking the cable car to the top of the rock. There we had some very close encounters with the Barbary macaques! Once back down to ground level it started to rain, so we beat a hasty retreat back across the border, stopping off at a McDonalds for a hot cup of coffee, only to find their coffee came in tiny cups, two slurps and it was gone!












Wednesday, we ventured up into the Sierra Navada, and visited the delightful town of Ronda. We even found the sunshine too! The roads through the mountains twist and turn with sheer drops off the edge, and no barriers to stop you going over the edge if you made a mistake! On the way there, we saw farms with groves of Olive trees, orange trees, and a few lemon trees too. We passed through a small village that had some market stalls and my wife decided to buy 2kg of oranges! God knows how we are going to get through that many oranges by the end of the week! Once we got to Ronda, we had lunch in a local restaurant, then headed back to the apartment. In the evening we spent an hour in the fitness centre, because the indoor pool was full due to the bad weather. By the time we got back to the apartment, the weather had cleared up and I braved a quick dip in the outside pool!




As the evening progressed, my wife began to feel ill. So much so, my daughter and I had to go to a chemist to get some medication.

Thursday, we decided to visit Nerja, specifically an aqueduct at Maro. On the way there, we stopped to fill the car with petrol as it was nearly empty. It only cost me €40 to fill it up! How the car hire company can justify charging us €75 is something I would have liked to ask them! When we got there, we found the aqueduct was covered in scaffolding undergoing maintenance and repairs! We then went back to the apartment as my wife was still not feeling well, and now my daughter was feeling unwell too! The evening brought on a heavy thunderstorm, so we all snuggled up on the sofa and watched some TV.


Friday morning, we had to attend a presentation by the resort. They wanted us to invest a lump sum of over four figures, plus an annual top up for a weeks free holiday every year at one of their 31 resorts all over the world. Because of the Spanish anti-harassment laws, we could easily decline the offer. With my wife still not feeling well, my daughter had the sniffles, and being a very generous girl, passed the sniffles on to me! So now all three of us were feeling under the weather. Despite not feeling 100% we were determined to keep going! Later in the afternoon, we just went exploring along the coast in the car as it was still raining. The thunderstorm came back again in the evening, and we discovered the apartment had heaters in the bedrooms. So for the first time all week they were warm and cosy at night!




Saturday, our last day in Spain. After packing everything, I noticed our suitcase was a lot heavier than when we brought it out! My wife told me she would sort it out at the airport once she could weigh it. After handing in the keys to the reception, we headed for Fuengirola, to try and find the market. Unfortunately, my SatNav couldn't locate it, and driving around town for 30 minutes didn't help either. Then we headed up into the national park (Parque Natural Torcal de Antequera), north of Malaga and enjoyed some spectacular views - well we did if the clouds moved out of the way!



Finally, we made our way back to Malaga. My wife insisted on buying more food, despite my misgivings that we had more food than we could take with us. We arrived at the airport and returned the car. Once inside the airport, we found a check-in desk with the scales still switched on. The suitcase weighed 30kg, and my wife then started to empty the suitcase to bring the weight down. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't fit everything into our had baggage. In the end, we had to eat a loaf of bread, a packet of salami, a litre of red wine, a litre of yoghurt drink, and a couple of oranges! She also managed to split her brand new leather holdall trying to stuff too much into it! Also she broke the zip of another bag! She was not a happy bunny! When we checked in, all my wife's efforts paid off, as we sailed through without a single hitch.

With 2 stops to top up the leaking fluid in the car, we finally made it home without any further incident at 04:00 Sunday morning.

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Home decorating.... Again!!

Last year, I had a major crisis when the hot water tank burst. The water poured through the ceiling and left stain marks on the ceiling and wallpaper. So during this holiday, I decided to make a start on redecorating our dining room. the picture above, is what the wallpaper looked like before I started the decorating.









First, I started to remove the radiator. Having done this before, I am becoming confident of doing this without any major mishaps. I just needed a couple of sauspans to drain the water from inside the radiator itself. This particular radiator made it even easier for me as there were valves at both ends to shut down the water supply, so I didn't have to go into the loft and shut down the water supply from there. Once I had losened the nuts at the base, all I had to do was open the bleed valve and let the water pour into the sauspan. When the saucepan was full, I tightened up the bleed valve to stop the water flow, emptied the saucepan, and then repeated the process until all the water was drained.



Soon, the radiator was off the wall. As you can see, there were loads of cobwebs behind the radiator. You can also see that when I last did the wallpapering, I hadn't removed the radiator. I hadn't even bothered to remove the original wallpaper either! I put special end caps onto the pipes to stop any potential leaks while I was doing the decorating. I also removed the support brackets for the radiator. One problem I did have though. The plastic grommets that held the radiator in place on the brackets had become brittle and disintegrated when I took the radiator off the brackets. Luckily, I still had some grommets left from when I had taken the radiator off in the hallway. Now I have only one grommet left, I think I will need to get some more in stock for my next decorating project!







Next, it was the infrared detector to be removed. This involved me shutting down the alarm system (which took 20 minutes of the external siren wailing before it shut up), then carefully removing the sensor, and making a note of the order of the wiring connections as I removed it. As you can see in this picture, you can clearly see the water damage, and also the last time I decorated this room I didn't remove the detector (I didn't have enough confidence in myself at the time to attempt such a task).










I then put masking tape arround the windows, floor edges, and light fittings. Then I commenced wallpaper stripping, with lots of help from my wife and daughter. Once the wall paper was off, I commenced painting the ceiling, window frames and the skirting boards.












Finally, all the preparation was completed< and with help from my wife and daughter, we started putting on the new wallpaper.












It took us two days to complete the wallpapering. We could have done it more quickly, but we only did a few hours each day, as we had other things we wanted to do with our time. As you can see from this picture, the room certainly looks different. Personally, I don't like the look of the wallpaper, but I let the girls choose what they wanted, and they seem very happy with the result!

Transparency of TV competitions

Normally, I avoid watching the TV reality/celebrity shows, where the outcome of who gets voted off relies upon telephone voting. The only exception is Dancing On Ice.

I have always wondered why none of the TV companies will show the actual number of phone votes each contestant gets. They used to do it many years ago. So why have they stopped? I am sure if the audience actually saw how many votes their favourite performer received, they would be more likely to pick up the phone and vote, if their favourite was in danger of being voted off the TV programme. Surely it would be in the TV programmmes interest to increase the revenue it gains from the phone calls, and also it would be more transparent about the voting process. Then they couldn't be accused of fixing the competititon.

I have left a couple of messages to the Dancing On Ice presenter Philip Schofield, in the hope he may redirect me to someone who could actually give a valid response to my question. Who knows, I might be lucky and get a reply from him!

Spam E-mails

Normally, when I get spam e-mails, I delete them immediately. I can also normally work out from which site I had given my e-mail address to, that has sold it on, generating the sudden increase in spam!

Today, I have been highly amused, as I have started to receive spam e-mails at work, and I am very curious to know how the spammers have got hold of it.

I have just received 3 love letters, almost certainly from the same person, but with different names and emial addresses. They all seem to be coming from a Russian girl Tanya/Lusine/Lusi, claiming she is a lonely girl searching for a man's attention. Then there is an email address to reply to.

Now, 6 years ago, I might have been tempted to reply, just to see what would happen next, and maybe have some fun pretending to be interested to see how far they would go to try and squeeze money out of me (learnt the hard way the first time around).

As I am a happily married man to a Belarusian woman, I have no intention of investigating this any further, unless I get my wife to write back to this girl, in Russian! I wonder what would happen then!

As to how this girl has got hold of my work e-mail address, I can only think of two possibilities. First was I had used the work computer 6 years ago to register on a dating website, and then closed the account 5 years ago, although that was extremely difficult to do as the company I work for had massivly restricted our internet access, so it took me a bit of time to find a way to redirect the e-mails to a computer that allowed access to the main website so that I could close the account and stop the spam e-mails coming through.

The other possibility, is that my daughter has sent me some e-mails with her homework attached for me to proof read for spelling and grammar. When I have checked and altered the homework, I send the e-mail back to my daughter. I have only been doing this for the last 3 months. So it seems more likely that the spammers have got hold of my company e-mail somehow through these correspondences.

When I get home, there should be an interesting and amusing conversation with my wife and daughter.

Governments Austerity Measures Hits The Working Class Hardest

After my Land Rover Discovery had been in for repairs for an entire week, I finally picked it up yesterday. I now have a major crisis as I need to find the money to pay the bill!!

The reason for the repair was at first what seemed a minor problem of a fuel leak from the bottom of the engine. When I took the car to my local garage in early december, they initially thought it was an oil leak, and not a fuel leak as I had thought. Still, I booked the Discovery in for repairs at the first opportunity a week later.

The garage took a look at the car, and discovered that the cylinder head was cracked, and fuel was leaking into the engine oil. I was told that a new cylinder head would cost £1100. They couldn't do the repair before Christmas, so I had to book it in last week.

I had worked out that the cost of repairs would not leave me with much change from £2000. Imagine my shock when I was presented with a bill for a few pence short of £3000 !!!

Looking at the breakdown of costs, about £1600 was for the parts, £900 for labour, and a whopping £500 VAT charged! I had to pay an extra £62.50 to the Government because the car was repaired this month instead of last month!! The garage even refused to give any discount for cash!

The garage has now lost my custom!

I have also noticed that the price of petrol and diesel have gone up by 10p a litre over the space of a month. So now it is even more expensive to have a car than before. Of course, public transport should be a viable alternative, except, due to previous Governments privatisation policies, the cost of public transport has gone up enormously, and any route that was unprofitable, reduced or eliminated. Where I live, I would have to add another hour to each end of my journey if I switched to pedal power. Buses are of no use as they do not operate outiside of daylight hours!!!

If the present Government continues with their plans to reduce the deficit so rapidly, I think they will kill any growth in the economy, as more and more people find that they cannot afford even the smallest luxuries anymore. If labour get into power again, all they will do is spend, spend, spend, and ultimately bankrupt the Country!

I've just received notification that my electricity is increasing by 8.5%. I am sure that gas, water and telecommunications will follow soon, it has to, as VAT has increased. I am almost certain that this year, very few employees will be given a pay rise that will negate the erosion of their wages by the government taxes imposed upon them.

I heard a guest on Radio 2 a few days ago mention that a good way to beat the VAT hike is to buy items second hand, as they are exempt from VAT. As a form of protest, I am now going to look closely at items I buy, and refrain from buying items that have VAT charged, unless I have absolutely no other option available. Does anyone know where I can buy second hand petrol and diesel from?

An Evenings Entertainment

Last night, my wife and I trundled off to London to see a special private (not a premiere as I had first thought) screening for investors only of the film "The Mortician".

My personal assessment of the film is as follows :-

I found the film was very slow to get started. I found it difficult to work out what was going on, and where the story was leading to.

The 3D effects were very good, although I did notice that when the camera panned along a street following a character, any graffiti writing on the walls went all blurry.

I found that Method Man's character, had very little depth to it. We learn he is a mortician and a taxidermist, but even with the flashbacks of his past, it is difficult to see what makes him tick emotionally.

The baddie in the movie is Dash Mihok's character "Carver". Again, I felt that more could have been done with his character, especially early in the film, showing more of his ruthless methods of keeping rivals and victims down. Then the second half of the film would have been even more tense.

Once the film got going, and the characters had taken on personalities, then it became interesting. I must admit I have never seen a movie where the principle character (Method Man) is shown as a coward, and basically frightened of his own shadow. Even with having to cope with his fears, he still manages to help others stand up for themselves. He eventually arrives at a position to help clear up any loose ends both physically and emotionally, as he comes to terms with his own demons.

There was one part that had me confused. When Method Man goes back to his home town to seek information about his mother, a woman who knew his mother informs him that she was murdered, and he was taken away without ever being given the chance to see her and grieve. So, why then is there a flashback of Method Man as a child looking at an open coffin of a woman, presumably his mother?

As an investor, I sincerely hope that people will go and see this film. In reality, It definitely will not catch on the way films such as "Slumdog Millionaire", "Ghost", and "The Full Monty" did. As the film was completed on a shoestring budget, it is quite an impressive achievement, and perhaps there may be a little profit in it for us, eventually.

Secretly, I was hoping that during the end credits, there would have been a special thanks to all the investors who had contributed to the film. Unfortunately, it looks like we will have to remain anonymous!

We're off to see a premiere!

As I have mentioned previously, I was lucky enough to be able to invest in a movie. This was three years ago. Now, on Monday 13th December, my wife and I have been invited to see the premiere of "The Mortician". We will meet the actors, directors, and other investors, and probably move on after the film to the celebration party afterwards.

I am hoping that I will be able to get an extra ticket, so that my daughter can also come along too!