Last time I blogged, I realised I was always moaning about this n that.  So, I've just returned from holiday and thought I'd write a few words about my fantastic trip to balance the scales...

I went to Nassau in the Bahamas for a week.  Vicks and I were invited to a poker tournament by one of my clients.  We had a fantastic time, only had to do an hour's meeting during the week and spent the rest of the time chilling out at Casino Atlantis on Paradise Island, playing some poker and eating dinner at Nobu, my favourite restaurant - can't beat it.

We were due to leave on Sunday to continue our holiday in Barbados so when we ventured back up to the room on Saturday night I checked the flight plan for the following morning.  Thats when I realised... the flight actually left two hours ago back to Miami where we were due to spend the night before heading off in the following day on the Air Jamaica flight down to Barbados.

Obviously I wasn't best pleased but after a few carefully chosen words with myself I was surfing The Net looking for another flight back to Miami so I could still check in my hotel and get away the next day.  It was 6pm by this time and I realised that there were no more commercial flights leaving the island.  This basically meant I’d lose my hotel money, the business class tickets down to Barbados and a few priceless days at Sandy Lane, my favourite hotel.

It was now I started to panic but managed to find a guy who seemed capable of getting a plane to come and pick us up from Nassau and fly us back to Miami the same evening.  I managed to get a good deal but in return he sent me a Piper Chieftain which I didn’t think would manage to take off with our luggage (I was travelling with Vicks) let alone us.  Vicks had also managed to develop a healthy fear of flying in the months before our trip and so when she found out we were taking an hours flight in a paper aeroplane she wasn’t best pleased. That said it was our only option if we were to catch up with our itinerary.

We headed to Nassau international for our 11.30 flight, and after much confusion found the right customs guy who told us to sit and wait in the terminal for our plane to arrive from Miami. We sat there for an hour and a half until the airport was closed, all the taxis had left and it was just Vicks, myself, a few bags and a cleaning lady.  I’d paid $2,500 on my credit card to this guy to come and get us and  was completely convinced now that I had been tucked up. After another hour of waiting, clock watching and cursing, I finally get the shout from the two pilots who came for me.   No apologies made but I was happy enough to see them so I didn’t care. We boarded the flight and headed over to Miami.

Vicks didn’t talk much on the flight. In fact she spent the time glued to the window trying to find things she could see on the water below! I fell asleep and woke up five minutes before we landed.  It was here we met US immigration and found out the pilot didn’t have the correct license to bring in non-resident individuals!  Something the big airlines like BA and Virgin have to carry, apparently.  After much pleading with the authorities and convincing that we’d only be in the country for four hours, he let us in, although he made the pilot aware that without his license, he was responsible for our behaviour during our time in America! Gotta love ‘em.

We arrived at our hotel at 3am in Miami and managed to get a couple of ours kip before heading off to catch the 7am to Barbados.  The plane was on time, Cliff Richard was sat in the row behind us and off we flew to Barbados!

Arriving at Sandy Lane, my shoulders dropped and I just completely chilled out the moment I walked in the door.  I had been a couple of times before, but this time was different.  Within 10 minutes of being on site I’d given the bags to the valet, changed into my Vilebrequins, and swam straight out to the raft in the sea.

We spent the week completely relaxing, I read my first book thanks to Lewis Hamilton and watched a couple of West Ham games with Jamie Redknapp and Scott Parker. 

I arrived back in Marbella last night and Urs from SportWagen brought my fixed Aston round this evening (read my last blog).  All seems well, my folks seem happier than ever here, the sun is shining, YourMarbella is busy and I’m ready for 2008!

It seems I only ever blog now when I pi**ed off!  I must start writing about happier times one day!

Its Christmas eve, and I just left Gibraltar after doing some last minute Christmas shopping, saving a few quid as you genereally do in Gib.   I'm driving my Aston on the dual carriageway heading back towards La Linea when a car pulls in front of me.  I swerve to avoid him and drive through the the largest pot hole I've ever seen.  Coming out the other side, the back of my car sliding around like I'm driving on a frozen lake,  I pulled over.  I'd blown the rear tire!

No problem - I'll get the spare I thought - but no, there are no spare wheels on Astons.  Puncture repair kit?  No.... not that organised I'm afraid.

Anyway, I called my friend Urs over at Sportwagen Marbella and he had the car on a truck to his workshop within an hour - fantastic!!   When we got it back though I realised I've actually blown two tires and bent two wheels on the o/s of the car... Ouch.  I wouldn't mind so much but I imported these wheels form California for around £2,000 a piece... Ouch ouch ouch. 

I guess the moral of this story is don't go cheap on your Christmas shopping ?.... Or don't drive nice cars in Spain ? Feel free to abuse me at this point - I thoroughly deserve it.

Rich

First time I've blogged in a while, guess this one is more out of frustration.

So anyway, I'm renting a modern penthouse right now in Marbella and everything has been absolutely fine, until today.  My family came over to drop off some Christmas stuff, and on leaving we took the lift down to the car park.  Almost at the bottom, it came to a screaching holt. Dont panic I was thinking, just press the call button and we'll be set.

....  No reply.  Phone the emergency number I thought... No signal on my phone (Im in a lift).  After ten minutes of continuous ringing of the 24 hour emergency contact bell and expecting a voice to come on over the telephone line, I lost it and decided to force the door and managed to climb out of the lift.

I phoned the emergency number when I got out and told them 4 people are stuck in the lift, in slow broken English ( no Spanish yet I'm afraid ).  After trying to explain I had an 'Emergencia', the guy said something and decided to hang up.

I rang again and explained again to another call agent who did her best after 20 minutes to get my details down.  We managed to communicate and she said she would send a technician right away to rescue the 4 people in the lift. 

That was two hours ago and guess what... No one has arrived. Luckily we all managed to get out on our own but it may not have been the case.

I seriously hope Otis Marbella haven't broken up for Christmas or they'll have a few law suits landing in the New Year...

I'm taking the steps from now on I know that much.  

*edit*... Six hours later, still no sign of the emergency call out guy!!

So, I've been living here now since April and still thoroughly enjoying it.  Hitting it a little too hard some nights recently perhaps, but nothing that can’t be solved with a weekend de-tox and a few nights in hanging out on YourMarbella.

It looks like Vicks and I have found a house here now after two years of looking which is great. Its hard to find your perfect house here, and one thing I’ve learned is that unless you build you have to compromise, there is no perfect house.  The other thing I’ve learned is that whilst its easy to change a house, you can’t change a plot and so its worth bearing that in mind when buying.  I feel like a property expert on this coast now. I must have seen over 60 villas these last two years in a number of different areas, and have been weighing up the pros and cons of each one.  We should probably start YM.com Estates to share the pain of buying here, but then I think I’ve had enough of Spanish property for one life time.

I have a huge frustration this month and that is that I am not enjoying taking my cars to the port.  Call me paranoid but every time I take my sport car out and park it, even just for one hour, its comes back covered in hand prints.  I’ll never understand the people who feel the need to touch, sit on, lean on or even stand on your car in the port for a photograph.  When in the UK it seems people have more respect, but here in summer I’ve seen people literally mauling the cars in the port.  Vicks saw someone lay on a Ferrari bonnet for a photo last week, these people don’t realise the scratches / dents they can cause from jeans, jackets etc, and it makes me cringe whenever I see it, hence my cars are locked away now until September!  

YM.com seems to be ticking along nicely.  We’ve had a thousand signups and we now have a good base of hard core users. With the holiday makers heading home soon we will focus our marketing a lot more on getting local people to the site and developing the tools to enable our community to invite others more easily.  We don’t want to become another touristy Marbella portal, thats not what we set out to do.  Our mission is to connect similar minded people in Marbella and we feel that post the summer madness we’ll be able to do much more to achieve this without all of the other noise on the coast.

Keep spreading the word about YourMarbella, we need more of you on board to continue building on our early success.  J

I thought I'd start my blog off with today's Marbella experience...

I bought my girlfriend a new Range Rover sport for Spain.  Knowing what the roads are like down here I was quite looking forward to bashing a few potholes and going places my sports cars simply do not allow. Today, I remembered a Cuban bar I went to on my boat about four years ago and I decided to find it in the truck. 

I found the bar, we had a little walk around, but it wasn't how I remembered it so we got back in the Rangey and I spotted a rather appealing sand track which led to another bar. I was feeling more than invincible so rather than take the road, I selected 'sand mode' I started slowly on my first off road experience.  Everything was going well 100 yards in until I reached the bottom of a dip and started on the slight up hill. I got about 10 more yards until the car stopped and we started slipping sideways.  I jumped out the car when we came to a stop and worked out using my petrol head, that if I jumped back in and accelerated really hard, we would be out of this mess in no time.  Now considering I studied physics at college, this probably wasn't the cleverest thing to do.

Guess what... I managed to get us further into the sand to the point the wheels were half buried.  At this point I waved for some help from a passing van on a nearby road. Luckily there were three Spanish guys in it and despite not understanding my slow, loud English, they were keen to help.  We managed to dig the wheels out and found some wood to lay on the sand.  With Vicks driving the car and us pushing we managed to get free and turn back.

I thanked the guys for their help and headed back to the main road.  We were however going back up the sand track we drove down and managed to get stuck worse than the previous time.  Again, luckily the Spanish guys came back to check we were okay, when they realised we were stuck again they all got behind the car and helped me push it up the hill.  My sandals came off, my feet were burning, I was getting sprayed with sand as I was stood behind the rear wheel, and by this point I was sweating like a pig.  It wasn't a good look.

Finally we were free and I thanked the guys in the way of a crisp €20 note. They were over the moon until they realised they had parked their huge van on the sand and... ..it was stuck. I tried to help them shift it but it was going nowhere, they had to call for serious reinforcements. How bad did I feel? 

Taxi to Nikki's next week then...