Category: Motorhome

Bateria de Cenizas – The Portman Guns

After a beautiful day yesterday, today was grey and overcast with no wind forecast, so when Derek said that Anne and He were going to have a walk to visit the Portman Guns we jumped at the opportunity to join them.

Gate to the Portman Guns
Gate to the Portman Guns

Portman is about 15 minutes away on the bike and the guns up a pleasant, wide track about 3km long. I can imagine this could be hot work on a sunny day but today it was perfect.

Portman Gun

 

 

The two guns were built by Armstrong and Vickers (GB) and date back to the 1920s/1930s. They are very impressive at 381mm and a range of 35km. Along with the guns at Portman a series of gun batteries were built to protect the important port at Cartagena.

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We finished with a ride into Portman Harbour to look at the beach. The sand is black! The area is now scarred by years of mining and although there have been efforts to clean the area up you can still see remains of pollution.

We went for coffee before the trip back home. A lovely day out.

Lesley’s birthday – hired car

Decided to hire a car for three days to coincide with Lesley’s birthday. We travelled south to Almeria to check out some of the campsites down there. Some were quite nice but none were as good as La Manga for windsurfing. We also travelled north to San Javier with similar results. Chinese meal on Thursday night was huge, we ended up taking enough home for another meal. Friday we took Derek and Anne to Cartagena for a big shop.

Bikes stolen during storm

Can’t believe we slept last night, heavy storm all night but some thief stole both our bikes (Specialized Rockhopper Pro and a Myka). They were chained together and to a sturdy tree and covered. They couldn’t be seen from the path so someone knew they were there. They must have been pinched them between 4 and 6 in the morning when we had finally got to sleep.

Stolen bikes

Campsite weren’t interested at all. Local police wouldn’t have had anything to do with us if we hadn’t been able to talk to them in (poor) Spanish. They insist on you bringing an interpreter if you can’t speak Spanish.

Sail repairs

Unfortunately Ian put his knee through his Hellcat 6.2 yesterday (such a good sail too) so today we took it into Lefkada for repairs. Mark who actually fixes the sails is a lovely bloke and does a great job mending sails, many of the windsurf schools use him, but one of his colleagues is a strange chap. He must have been on some sort of aggressive customer service course as I have now had a couple of incidents with him.

The company have a head office (where you take the sails) and a sail loft where Mark works which is a couple of miles before their office. I thought it would be nice to say hello to Mark, introduce Ian to him and show him where the loft is. Jolly Joe (not his real name), was there delivering sails for repair and greeted us with “What are you doing here? You are not allowed here (it was a public highway), this is my private place and I don’t like anyone coming here” (sorry Mark you’re not allowed any friends). When he had finished his warm welcome I explained our purpose and told him we were indeed on our way the the head office to drop off the sail but even Jolly Joe could see the sense of leaving the sail at the loft and save him a of following us to collect the sail from the office and then bring it back out to the loft.

While in Lefkada Ian took me to an ironmongers I hadn’t been to before (now my new favourite shop). Sells everything you could wish for and passes the test of being able to buy just the one screw if you so wish. Their range was not just extensive with items that were beautifully made and plated in chrome (which Ian nor I recognised) but was timeless. They had the very latest from the very oldest technologies. A great shop and worth a visit.

Goodbyes

Happy Swiss day Switzerland! Today, rather randomly perhaps (as it’s Thursday) sees the departure of many of our new friends and neighbours.

Hugo and Marliss are leaving after 2 weeks in their motorhome into a local house where they will continue their holiday for another 2 weeks. We will at least see them at Sun Waves where we keep our windsurfing kit. They have been kind and considerate neighbours, fetching us little presents from chocolates to completely indulgent high calorie cream cakes. Yesterday they gave us an enormous plant which will shall keep until we leave and then try and find a good home for it before we leave – there’s no way we can take it home.

Danny, his wife and 2 children leave today to go back to Holland. The boys are very active, practising their hockey or riding around the campsite on their space scooters; one has white golden hair that many windsurf instructors try and emulate and the other has black hair. They are also pretty good windsurfers, the eldest being only 10 (last week). Danny worked as an advanced instructor before he married and is an excellent windsurfer. He kindly took time out to help me improve my windsurfing and I was very happy when I successfully executed a fully planing carve gybe, staying on the plane through to the exit.

Andreas and his wife also go back to Holland today. Andreas will be missed by everyone; a Greek national, married to a Dutch wife and speaks fluent French. He has got to know everybody. He has been my local support in my quest to learn to speak Greek and the things pertaining to Greek culture and the way of life. They have left us with the most delicious olive oil made from olives grown in the family olive groves and pressed by hand, plus assorted homegrown organic vegetables that will influence our meals for the next few days.