A momentous week - Saturday 26th of May!

We had been trying to source suitable bedding for the guest rooms and for our master bedroom for a little while. We had found some duvet cover and pillow case sets and some all season duvets we wanted to buy from Amazon in the UK. Amazon ship to Spain and we thought this would be perfect as we could get all the stuff from them and it would be delivered with no problems. Wrong! Amazon also host outside sellers using their website infrastructure to sell their wares. If you buy anything from one of those sellers then they don’t adhere to Amazon’s policies but have their own!  Confusing huh?

Well we had set off shopping and ended up with 6 items and found out at checkout that only one of them was Amazon’s own stock so we’d not be able to have them sent to Spain! Dammit! So plan B was duly sought. I have a wonderful longstanding best friend in the UK called John Lloyd. I asked him if he minded ordering the items on our behalf and then we could transfer the money to him for the costs and the shipping. We had found out that Parcelforce in the UK could ship to Spain pretty reasonably and within 5 days so we would be quite happy to take this option to get what we wanted.

John had ordered all the items for us and they had begun to arrive with him. He had begun to realise that they might be a little bulky to deliver in one go. But his way of getting around this was unexpected and also a great surprise! He messaged me via Google Chat on the Saturday to say that the shipping was costing him about £200! I said what the hell did he mean? He asked me to go onto Skype and told me that his new employers (Bentley Motor Company) had told him he had to take the Jubilee holidays off so he had booked to fly out with most of the items in his luggage with him! A personal delivery and a very welcome one at that! John was due to arrive at Almeria airport on Saturday June 2^nd at 11.00am; he was going to stay with us till the Tuesday. We were overjoyed as he was going to be our first visitor!

One down, three to go!

I had woken up at 5.30am that day and watched the sun come up over the Mediterranean from our lounge. I had been given a tip that we could slice lemons and freeze them and they would serve two purposes, be like ice and also add lemon to drinks!  I had picked a load of lemons the previous day so they were duly sliced and put into freezer bags to freeze for drinks! As usual there were all the usual things to do, empty the dishwasher, put some washing on the line and another load in. I also had to turn on the water to top up the pool. Another new thing to learn about! We had also begun assembling sunbeds for the pool and patio later that morning before heading out to do some more shopping.

After John’s news we had had lunch and did more things around the house to get things sorted out and put more into an order we would be happy to live with.