First signs of southern spain winter

We are now feeling the first signs of winter in southern Spain. Our heater has been used a couple of mornings, the snow cap of the highest peaks of Sierra Nevada are now permanent and we’ve also had a couple of gales. But everything is relative – with a few exceptions we are still wearing the “cruiser uniform”, i.e. shorts, t-shirt and sandals. It is kind of funny to meet the local Spanish population dressed as for a cross country ski trip. So what have we been up to lately? Firstly we have got a rental car for a really good price for two months. A car makes a big difference to quality of life as Almerimar is slightly isolated, especially as we have no bicycles, yet.  We have also done further maintenance, installation work on the boat. We plan to have a section on this blog about “the boat” including technical stuff.  Not so funny was my stupid mistake when installing “The Wirie”, a Wifi complete antenna and access point solution only requiring power. Part of the background was the painful bureaucracy having to wait about 4 weeks on customs processing in Madrid. My mistake was to connect the Wirie to 24V so it crashed, especially stupid since I very well knew I had to use the 12 V voltage splitter I ordered together with the kit. So maybe by Xmas we have this gear installed and working. What it does – it is a “WiFi sniffer”, looking up available networks, claiming a 3 km reach, which I doubt. We have also been social – we try to meet up with the “Scandinavian community” once a week, a mixed group of sailors, golfers and retired expats. Last week we were invited to our neighbors in the marina, Ulrike and Peter from Munich, Germany. We had a very nice evening enjoying good food and sharing experience from past sailing; especially valuable was the information about Croatia which we hope to see next year.  This week we spent two days in the lovely town Nerja to celebrate a couple of anniversaries.  More on Nerja in a later blog post.