For being unemployed, life seems to be incredibly busy. The month of September was dedicated to settling into a new city, country, culture, language, and school. We were finally feeling settled into a routine, and our first visitors arrived. The timing seemed perfect.
Ruth and Earl arrived and we had a few days to visit with them before Tyler, Marzia, Lilli and Elisa joined. The next week was packed with adventure and fun! We started off by celebrating Tyler's birthday (the kids can tell you about his special cake 😉). We also celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving, which just added to the two weeks of eating and drinking way too much. We enjoyed cooking many meals at home trying to master tapas, paellas, and seafood dishes. We also had some lovely meals eating out at the local restaurants.
We did a beautiful hike in the Alpujarras, despite the torrential downpour. We explored the caves of Nerja as well as the town. We hiked El Caminito Del Rey, which was once considered one of the most dangerous hikes in the world. It was recently redone however, and is now an incredibly safe boardwalk suspended from the cliffside over a gorge. It was spectacular, especially seeing the old crumbling path below the existing one. We spent a day in Granada exploring Alhambra and the old town. This is definitely a place we can return to many times with visitors and learn something new on each visit. We had a few great beach days, a mixture of chilling out, paddling, snorkeling, kayaking, and enjoying the beautiful weather, scenery and company.
Unfortunately, during the week of 10 people in the house, we had a few issues.... We lost water for a day, internet was intermittent at best, we lost power for 3 days, and in turn lost a lot of food (luckily cervesa can thaw and be refrigerated again without going bad), the car broke down...and then came the uninvited house guests!
During the week we were all noticing an increase in the number of bites we were getting (mostly at night), then we started noticing blood marks on the sheets. We first thought that we had bed bugs, but then found evidence of fleas, and found out that the signs are similar. The next week was spent researching how to remedy the situation (when we had working internet), trying to get our landlord to believe us, trying to get the rental agency to understand the urgency of the problem, and trying to systematically clean and fumigate while living in the house and entertaining. Our guests were amazing, even though all of us were exhausted by the end of the week. We all looked like we had chicken pox, we weren't sleeping at night due to the itching, and psychological battle of knowing the little critters were coming out to feed. With so many people in the house, it was impossible to isolate any areas, and we weren't given enough fumigation bombs to do the whole house. The rental agency brought us 3 bombs for a 5 bedroom house with 2 separate living areas. By only doing the 3 worst rooms, I think we just made them mad and they spread to the rest of the house.
The day our guests returned to Germany, they steam cleaned their luggage and wrapped everything they brought in plastic to go directly into the freezer when they returned home, as we wanted to make sure they didn't take the issue home with them. I went to town with them and rented another vehicle, then Shane and I worked non stop for days to rid the house of our unwelcome visitors. We gave up on the rental agency taking care of the problem, and tackled it ourselves.
We bought a steam cleaner and steamed everything in the house! Every door, closet, baseboard, headboard, mattress, window frame, curtain, bedframe, couch, chair, cushion, table... Then we bought an entire case of fumigation bombs, and fumigated the whole house at once except the kitchen. We then took every single linen, towel, blanket and pillow to the laundromat, and washed and dried them with high heat. We bought an industrial sized plastic wrap and wrapped all the clean linens in airtight packaging. We also plastic wrapped our mattresses, so any little critters who may have escaped the steaming or fumigating would not be able to get out. We spayed all the baseboards and furniture legs with a special spray, put powder in baking cups under all the bedframe legs so no critters could climb up and thoroughly ventilated the house to get rid of any excess fumes. We swept and mopped and dusted the house from top to bottom. We took all outdoor cushions and scrubbed and soaked them in the tub and hung to dry. We washed all of our camping gear in the tub and hung to dry, and we set dish soap and tea light traps in every room of the house and lit them every night all week to monitor if we were successful in our eviction attempts.
Then.....we locked up the house and left for a four day weekend in Portugal....which was fabulous, and a much needed break!
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