last minute changes of Plan.

30/3/24

Its only a few days now till we set off to Madrid for a week but we are nowhere near organised.

We had expected to sort things out this week, so by now there should be nothing left to do. But that hasn’t been the case.

Firstly, and most importantly (apparently) Jaki cannot decide what clothes to take as the weather forecast isn’t good.

She tells me the weather will be very much like the UK so she will have to take enough clothes to cover all eventualities. Given she only has one suitcase, this has been a serious challenge and she has had a lot of sleepless nights.

So instead of shorts and ‘T’ shirts, she has to take:- Wet weather clothing ( in two different colour pallets). Clothing for cold weather, clothing for hot weather and clothing that will cope with the predicted wind.

She has packed and unpacked her case several times over the last few weeks and it still isn’t finalised.

I have been working at Georgia’s for the past 4 days.

She had a ‘Media Wall’ built in her new house and paid a painter to paint it.

It seems she forgot to ask him to paint inside as well as out, so when he had finished, all the insides of the cupboards were left in a lovely shade of MDF.

As per contract, he only painted one undercoat and one top coat so you could see the filler and the joints through the paint. Not the finish Georgia was expecting. So DIY Dad was recruited.

This addition to my schedule has meant I haven’t been able to sort things out as planned, so I will have to get organised over the next few days.

The Hotel (Hostel Abadia Madrid) has been booked for a while but I got a message from friends who live in Spain to say they had re-booked their rooms and got a significant discount and they suggested we do the same.

Last night Jaki revisited the booking she made with Booking.com and found her booking was reserved but she could cancel it ‘free of charge’ up until Monday. The existing Booking was £700+ yet when I tried to book the same dates in the same room at the same Hotel I got it for £100 cheaper.

I contacted my mate in Spain who said he had got his room for €76 but we were still looking at £100 a night. He suggested we try on the mobile rather than on the Lap top. For some reason he felt this way might offer better options.

Sure enough, Jaki was able to get a further reduction on her mobile phone. So we re-booked (this time we had to pay in full ) and then cancelled the original booking. This saved us about £150. Though we were confused as to whether we should pay in Euros or in Pounds?

Booking.com offer both options when we came to payment. However, there was some confusion about the actual amount as they gave two different prices [In Euro’s] for the room.

They Also provided their current exchange rate which was €0.80 something.

Now I tell you all this because we couldn’t work out whether it was best to pay the bill in Euros or whether to pay in Pounds. I was using My Halifax Clarity card so there are ( I think) no charges for using the card either to pay in euros or in pounds. If I understand correctly the actual amount of Euro’s charged was the rate offered on that day where as, if I had chosen to pay in £ I would have been subject to the rate on that day, the day the exchange took place and that may or may not have been better. But it could have been worse.

It was all a bit confusing and a bit of a gamble. I will only know the answer when the bill finally comes through?

So the room is book.

The next thing I tackled was getting from the Airport to the Hotel.

Having looked on line, there seems to be plenty of options. There is a train, a Bus and the subway all of which offer ( so I’m told) simple and cheap options, though it will be late at night and things that look easy on the computer are always much more difficult late at night when its dark in a strange town.

I have had a look this morning and it seems we get the train from the Airport to Nuevos Ministerios [Station] Madrid then swap to another train from there to Estacion De Trek Madrid SOL.

From there it’s a 10 minute walk to our Hotel. So we will see.

I have, as a precaution recorded the location of these key spots on ‘What3Words “ the web based Map that plots every square meter and gives each one a specific three word code.

So for reference:

The Hotel Abadia is: float.alas.fell

And the Sol underground station is:

plotting.dime.sweetly

Fingers crossed.

I still need to get the Easy jet boarding stuff sorted out and make sure I have copies either on my phone or printed out. I usually print the tickets/boarding passes but it’s been a long time since we flew so things have moved on and it’s more acceptable to have that information on your mobile phone these days. I’ll see how I get on with that.

Then I have to do the same with the parking at Bristol Airport.

I’m starting to look forward to our week away though with hind sight we could have done things differently.

Originally we weren’t going to Mojacar this year but then our Landlord offered us the whole of May which is a great month. It’s warm without being ‘Too Hot;’. Usually he likes to go in May but for some reason, he isn going till June this year, so it’s free.

If we had known, we could have taken April and May then we could have flown up to Madrid for a few days and returned to Mojacar.

We are meeting up with Dave and Steph, Terry and Sue in Madrid so we will have some company for the first few days but then our friends Larry and Hazel were flying in and they were staying for the rest of the week.

Sadly Larry has been taken Ill and they won’t now be able to join us which is a real shame as they are great company.

So Jaki and I will have to find some things to do in Madrid for the rest of the week.

Let’s hope the weather improves or Jaki will have to go shopping for winter clothing, and another suitcase to bring it all home in.

I forgot to mention in this original blog that I had updated my ‘Fair Fx’ card (one of those cards you can pre load with Euros) so I needed to put some Euros on the new card. When I went on line they had changed the lay out of the web site too so we couldn’t work out how to transfer money from my bank account to the card.

We had 3 failed attempts only successfully completing the transaction on the 4th try.

However the next day I had a text from Fair FX telling me there was £500 of Euros waiting to be paid for.

I went back on line and to my surprise each of our failed attempts had been recorded as a request for £500 worth of Euros’s, so I now owed them £1500.

Nothing is ever simple.