Eurasia Mega Trip - Days Forty Two - Four - Daily Life In El Campello

The reason for long search that led us to finding our place in El Campello and the reason we keep coming back is our long steady decline in physical capabilities. It is true that we still have the ability to show bursts of energy and capability when it comes to our travel adventures. But, as I described following our multi-day burst in Madrid, we need periods to recuperate. And prior to Wife having bounced back from the issues that assaulted her the last couple of years, we had serious doubts as to our ability to travel as we had done earlier. 

What our place here provides us with is a situation where we can 'live' as opposed to go 'do'. The everyday tableau on the water, the ability to shop and cook, the markets, the places to go walking, the places to hang out in, all create an environment where we can enjoy living in. And we still have things that motivate us to pull out the cameras for shooting.

Thought we were done with cats when we left Türkiye?

  Cat-o-pia El Campello 

 There is a never ending parade of sailing vessels...especially on weekends

 This year the sunrises and sunsets have not been quite as spectacular as other years, it is still a wonderful place for them. 

 We start having family visiting tomorrow, so the pace of things will definitely be picking up

Eurasia Mega Trip 2026 -Day Forty One - The Morning Rhythm Method

One of our daily joys in El Campello is going out for long walks in the early morning. The physical location of Spain in its time zone means that the sun doesn't come up until around 8am at this time of year. There will be just a hint of light coming up from the horizon in the East across the water at 7am. As returning readers know, that leads to great sunrises which in turn leads to the photo mad Eldership crew taking pictures like crazy. As we are now fully acclimated and settled in, let the madness begin.

 Avramar Acqua Farming ship moving out of the harbor

They still haven't hired me to do their promotional work 

 

 Our only 'Tower'

 

 

 

Along the beach

 

 Mostly shooting in the harbor today

 

 

 

Predators of El Campello

(Inspired by recent photos taken by follower 'The Count' of Grizzly Bears catching and eating salmon in the wild)

 

 Stalking

 

 

Attacking and capturing the prey

 

Devouring same

The Return Home

Eurasia Mega Tour 2026 - Days Thirty Eight - Forty - The Home Coming, El Campello

On Thursday the 1st we returned home...not to ElderFleet Command in Albuquerque, New Mexico...but to ElderBase One in El Campello, Spain. This has been our 'happy place for four years now. It has been the one place we have found in all our travels where we are happy to come back to and just 'live'. That becomes more and more important to us as age puts limits on how much we can do when we travel. 

The drive from Madrid to El Campello is almost exactly four hours. It is always wearying. I am not that fond of driving and the road has almost no straight stretches (literally). It is worst the final hour before we arrive when you are at your most tired.

But then we arrive and the apartment is as you remember it. We quickly rearrange the furniture to our desires. We go to our respective rooms and lay things out. We do a quick immediate shopping for dinner and breakfast the next day. We know where everything is in the supermarket and the products we like. The next day we do our big shopping and it is much the same. We know where things are. We know what we like. We don't have to wander around and figure out what things are. 

It is important to note that the 'view' aspects of the apartment are significant to our enjoyment of place. It is very difficult in our experience to get the breath of view, with the closeness to water, in a place that has so much happening in the water to watch. If we were in different accommodations, I'm not sure we would love this locale as much. 

Return to our Happy Place 

 Are the forces of the universe speaking to you when Wife can find her favorite soft drink, heretofore never seen on our travels, in our big supermarket here!

 

 Local Laundry Shots

 The day we arrived it was stormy

 

 Birds torment me. They fly by the windows almost every night. By the time, I whip out my camera, they are far away. 

A Reminder Of The Importance Of Savoring Each And Every Day

A couple of weeks ago, Wife's brother, her absolutely closest sibling, had a motorcycle accident. He has been in the hospital every since. It is one of these things where you're not sure what is going to happen. There are good days and a lot of really not good days. He and I are the same age. It is not easy to rebound from something like this under the best of circumstances at our age. It has Wife in a state of real misery. You have all these emotions, and you are not in any position to do anything to help. 

My Brother-in-law has rode bikes his entire life. He is an incredibly safe rider. He knows his machines. He has gone all over the world riding. He understands handling in different road conditions and being safe. And he was hit by a deer. Not he hit a deer. But as best as we can tell based upon the second hand information we have, it was a freaking deer who hit him. I am sure it was one of these fluke situations. 

So as we sit in our position of not being able to contribute, it has led to the conversations between Wife and I on what we want to happen if such an event happens to us. That conversation has a lot more meaning than it did even a few years ago. In the last few years, Wife had a near fatal blood clot. She was cruelly assaulted and had her foot broken. It took six months before she could walk normally again.I had a vicious asthma incident that lasted months. Thankfully we have overcome all of these and are in very good shape. But at our age each easily could have had a different outcome. 

As I am in spitting distance of 80, there is a growing awareness that something is coming to get me. It's not if, it's when. Knowing my brother-in-law and how fully he has led life and the craziness of the incident, it is huge wake up call.

Each day needs to be lived to the fullest. Don't worry about what might happen. Trust. Accept. Take advantage of every single moment. Let the things that bring fear and worry pass through you like like water and let them be eliminated. You don't know how many days you have left. Don't piss them away. Savor each one.  

What Wine Pairs Well With Bologna?

"Why would one care?", you ask.

It dates back to Wife and my eating regime which has evolved over recent years whereby we eat two meals a day. We eat breakfast. And we eat a large meal mid-afternoon between 2:30 and 3:30. This large meal is usually what one would serve for dinner. What has gone by the wayside is lunch along with things like sandwiches and salads. We do eat a large salad on Saturday for our big meal.

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly had a craving. I wanted a Bologna Sandwich. I floated the idea that we would have this as our 'big' meal on Sunday. And since we were 'just' having a sandwich, if we ate on the early side, we could make popcorn later. Inspired. 

Come today, it was time for the meal. But, I was anguished. Our big meal is when I have my one glass of wine (under the new tyranny of the gout regime). What wine to serve with a Bologna Sandwich. I decided that Bologna (which is named for an Italian city), is like Mortadella, also Italian, that an Italian wine would be appropriate. As I have quite a few Barolo in stock, I chose one of those. Barolo is a pretty heavy duty wine, but, as the great Michelin stared chef, Joel Robuchon, said when ask how he paired wine with what he was eating said, "I just drink what I like." So if I want Barolo with Bologna Sandwich, that's what we're having.

 

 Classy, if I say so myself (those pickles are homemade BTW)

In other de-I World Headquarters News...

The Annual Failure of The Peach Pruning Harvest has begun

 

Despite all my efforts, despite the efforts of the California illegal immigrant labor, there are as many freaking peaches as usual.

 I watched this tree all during its early phases and was convinced that finally this year I had finally succeeded in reducing the number of peaches to a reasonable amount. I am convinced their are supernatural peach pixies that around the time of harvest cast spells which double or triple the number of peaches on the tree.

I will admit that they exceptionally good this season

 

 And while I may suck at restraining peaches from growing I EXCEL with Quinces. 

Or I should say Quince.

 

 Yes, this is our annual Quince. This is our second year of growing a single, solitary Quince. 

If you are not familiar with Quince, it takes a lot of preparation to get something edible. One Quince of this size will yield about three tablespoons Quince puree. We are giving lottery slots out to see who gets to harvest the Quince.  

 

 

 

Return Of Deal Lust

There are times when something comes back that you thought was long gone. And in coming back you find yourself surprised. You think, "I thought that was dead. I didn't know I still had that in me?" And you find yourself deep into doing something that used to define who you were but had been put to the side for a different reality. 

So it is that de-I 'DEAL GUY' seems to have been resurrected. 

Who is 'DEAL GUY'? 

Back in the day, in a much earlier iteration of my career. I was a 'DEAL GUY'. I was the person who would put together multi-million dollar purchases and sales of businesses. It was a heady activity. And truthfully, humbling and frustrating as well. You were dealing with a 'lot of money'. Things never went as planned. You could work for year and have a transaction crater earning nothing for all your work. 

But there was no denying the adrenaline that flowed as you navigated the ups and downs of trying to make a transaction happen. The really interesting thing of putting deals together as an intermediary is you had no real control. All the decisions were made by the principals, the buyers and the sellers. But your job was to 'Make It Happen'. And you did your best. You used every bit of knowledge and tricks you'd learned to pull the transaction together. You did this (hopefully) for the good of your client, but also because your own financial well being depended on it. But there was also a lot of ego, and excitement (and disappointment) associated with dealing with large transactions that had large fees (fees paid to you!).

Why I bring this up is I find myself back in this mode, filling this persona once again. The short story is I have been helping a client try to exit their business for over two years now. Originally, I was to help them pass the business to their son. But their son had some kind of mental breakdown and simply walked out on the company, the deal, and his parents. Harsh. 

So we had to build a plan B. This was hard for the couple selling. We also had poor financial information so I had to get an fractional CFO in to get things straightened out. That took a year! The husband of the couple wanted to sell it to a couple of insiders/employees. We made them a proposal based on the numbers we had at the time. They took forever to get their act together and start following through. In the meantime, we finally got the financial information we needed and 'Surprise' the company is doing way better than we thought. So the price we offered to insiders is a real bargain. 

However, the insiders have refused to put down a non-refundable deposit. So we told them no exclusivity. I immediately start looking for other buyers because the real value is about a third more than what is being offered to the insiders (and we are talking millions of USD here). And as luck would have it, we are introduced to an extremely qualified buyer and are aggressively pursuing discussions with him. 

Oh. And as an added fillip. I make no fee if we sell to the insiders but I make a BIG fee if we sell to the outsiders! You don't think I'm back in DEAL GUY mode? It is like Shane, the classic Western with de-I in the title role.  

Warmth Returns

Since we returned from SE Asia in early April, the weather has been unseasonably cold. My friends tell me that while we were gone in March, the opposite was true. The weather was unseasonably warm. 

Typically in late April, things are warming up here, and by early May it will be downright hot. We've had many a year when by the end of the first week of May it was problematic to plant in the garden because the heat made it difficult for new plantings. Based on this I confidently scheduled the change over of our heating system to our evaporative cooling system on April 21.

Oopsie 😬

The weather has been super cold since then. The highs barely in the low 70's often in the 60's. The lows in the 40's. As a result our house has been extremely cold, with us sleeping with three or more blankets on. Not fun.

FINALLY, this weekend we are having highs in the 80's with even a day or so toward 90 predicted. Lows are in the 50's. I can at last put on shorts and open our windows. And we are now safely inoculated against Viking Expeditions from Sweden as they have a hard time surviving in temperatures above 80.

Enjoying The Changing Seasons

Not the changing of the climatic seasons (though the lengthening days and softening weather is indicating that too). But rather, the seasons of my life from the 'travel' season to the 'home' season. Like the tropics where they have a wet and dry season, we of de-I-andia have the two seasons of 'travel' and 'home'. 

This 'home' season is starting off particularly nice. The home season is marked by the return to the 'one true bed' and the 'shower of enlightenment', not to mention the 'wine cellar of bliss' (though used in more controlled fashion due to the necessities of gout control) and renewal of work on 'the Story'. 

There is enjoyment of the Man-Tower especially as the longer days are bringing longer sunsets at times when they can be enjoyed more. Although there is frustration on the 'what I can eat and not eat' front, I am using that as stimulus to be creative with my meal design and cooking. 

I have just the right number of clients to keep me stimulated and they are all engaging situations that have interesting aspects to them. 

Theodora and Rotary EDI are both moving along. They have their challenges but nothing that is demanding huge stress or worry on my part. 

And I'm sure  there will come the time when I will be longing for the return of 'travel'. But for now it is melding into the mellow. 

(This post brought to you with much gratitude that there are no 'remodels', 'roofs to be repaired', or 'major irrigation' issues. At least so far 🫰🏼) 

 

Asia Mega Tour 2026 - Day Thirty Seven - Around The Hood

Normally when we arrive at a new locale, we will take a couple of days and get ourselves situated. We will figure out where the services we need are (like a supermarket and restaurants), and we will figure out how best to get around to them. Things were turned around here in JB because the 3's had arrived before us, only had a short time here, and wanted to be out and doing things. So it was only today that we really had a chance to figure out where were really were and what it had. This is just to give you an idea of our surrounds and where we are staying. 

 We be staying in a huge complex built by Chinese investors back in the days of their go-go building. It was thought that many Chinese would buy, use and/or rent these properties. However, the change in economics and restraint by the Chinese government on citizens moving capital or themselves out, changed the dynamics.

 

 One of the oddities of this whole complex is it is oriented toward automobile owners. There is no formal lobby for the buildings as you would find in other countries. You walk through a parking lot to get to the entrance to your building.

Our apartment has three bedrooms and three bathrooms

 

 

 

 We are favored with a view looking over a fine example of modern architectural scaffolding!

 

 If you go out on the balcony and turn, you get a different view

 

 

 

 Zoomed in view of people on the mud flats at low tide

 

A quick walk around the areas surrounding the complex

 Exiting our building

 

 A fruit stand specializing in Durian so the scent was very powerful

 

 Walking toward the center

 

Across the main road was a walking only space lined with restaurants leading to the entrance to a mall. Inside the mall was an Aeon, a major supermarket chain

 

A bit of sculpture

 

 

 

 Then walking toward and along the water

 

 

 

 

 

A couple working in focused solitude on a harvest from the mud

Though in fact surrounded by opportunists awaiting their chance to pounce