Thursday 24-8-2006

Today we went to our lawyer at Vera to start the process for making a Spanish will. We are also going to apply officially to become Spanish residents as this helps to get our full health service facilities by reciprocal agreement with the UK. I assumed that we already had these forms from our very first visit to the Mayors office in Bedar when we bought the car. However for these residents cards we have to apply via our lawyer with our NIE and passport documents and then we have to go down to Almeria with some more passport pictures and there have our finger prints taken and then at some stage after that they will send our residency cards to us, we hope. I had read about this document before and about people spending many hours waiting at the local police station to be processed. We would have left this until later except for it’s connection with the Spanish NHS so we had better grasp the nettle sooner rather than later.
After this session with our lawyer we travelled further up the coast, via a supermarket, for a paddle and picnic to a resort called Villaricos. It is north of Garrucha and a little further round the coast from the naturist beach, that we stumbled upon a while back. We bought fresh French stick bread and some ham and cheese together with drinks and a sort of sweet cake in a plastic bag, that Elayne fancied. We have not been up in this area before and it’s very nice. We got to the beach and tucked into broken fresh rolls stuffed with ham and cheese (what a life), they were delicious. As we were about to eat the sweet cake we noticed on the label that they were called ‘Fartons’. I kid you not we sat on the beach and ate fartons!!!! They were actually very nice once we had got over the name, but very sweet (I suppose they had to be really ;-)))))))
Pam phoned from Taberno to say that Javier (pronounced Havia), the builder, will start on the site work on Monday morning at half past eight, so we should see some real progress up on site. Also today via Gill and the internet, we have made contact with a chap in Essex who has two static caravans for sale at a site just north of us at Antas (about 6k away). We have arranged with a friend of his, at Antas, to go to see these caravans, described as immaculate, tomorrow at twelve. It would be really useful if we could get these two at a reasonable price and then have them shipped up to Taberno quite soon. We’ll see.
Pictures today of our drive up the coast near San Juan de Terreros, but not of us eating fartons. And an agnostic Mantis (not praying) that Elayne spotted on the patio this morning. It’s such a good picture that you can zoom in quite a long way to see it’s slit eyes and it’s markings.