What a blooming commotion it’s been today.
As we were driving onto the tarmac we spotted Javier’s lorry going towards our caravan with more building materials on the back. I explained to him in, my very eloquent Spanish that we have ‘no contracto’ yet, but if he wishes to unload it all then that’s OK by me. He unloaded it all and even brought some more this afternoon. We had just returned from Taberno when we heard this loud rumbling further down the camino. We drove down to find that a ruddy great JCB type earth scraper was levelling the camino. We had been told that they do this from time to time and especially after heavy rain. Well we have not seen this happening on any other camino but hey ho. However the old man that was driving out in front to forewarn oncoming vehicles of the oncoming of this machine just happened to be the man we had seen on the next piece of land to ours. When they arrived at our border they stopped, got out of their respective vehicles and spent a long time gesticulating towards his plot of land. The JCB chappie then spent a long time on his mobile phone. At first we thought that they were perhaps council spies and that we had been rumbled already. After a lot of walking around and more phone calls I went down to see what ‘was to do’. They showed me the blade of the scraper on this machine and clearly it was worn right down to it’s rivets. Later a lorry arrives with a compressor and a new blade (it took two men to lift the blade for each half of the machine. After about an hour the lorry withdrew and the JCB driver moved onto the next door piece of land and proceeded to clear some scrub area. I walked down just in time to see them straying over into our plot. When they saw me coming down again they reversed up and got back onto the proper boundary course. I don’t suspect any ill intent with this huge machine but it’s just as well that we were here. They scraped quite a swath of scrub before lunch time and then back to work on the Camino. I think that a ‘quick cash in back pocket job on the side’ made them happen to scrape this camino today. It will be interesting to see if any other Camino’s get a wash and scrape up. I suspect that the owner of the land next door will probably plant more almonds and claim a huge EU subsidy for land reclamation.
Life is peaceful again but it makes us realise what we are in for when the building work starts on the house.