UPDATE: SPAIN 2005

It has been so long since I posted anything, that now you are just going to get condensed and glossed over accounts of what I can remember. But I can post photos, so maybe a few pictures will say a thousand words.

August means Spain, and once again we rented an apartment in Torremolinos at a complex called Costa Lago. It is where VW and I first went in 1993. Last year we had what they call an atico (a top floor apartment with roof access) that we found through the Internet. This year we rented a similar apartment through our friend, Carlos. It was slightly cheaper, and actually would have been fine if we had rented it first. The one we had last year had just a little nicer floorplan and nicer furnishings. When we did the math, the cost per person per day was worth it to us, so we will try to get the nicer one again next year.

Carlos was on his way out of town for his holiday, so our arrival, key exchange, cash exchange meeting was sort of brief and hurried. He was sure he had given us two sets of keys, but VW, who had arrived first from the US, was sure he had not. So we limped along on one set of keys and no garden gate key for a while.

On the first day I accidentally locked us out because I thought The Spouse had the keys! He had taken the girls down to the pool, I followed a while later, and forgot that he had told me to bring the keys along with me. He was not a happy camper. I knew the neighbors were home, so I knocked on their door and asked if it would be okay if I climbed over their atico walls to my atico. We had left the door unlocked, so I just walked in. The neighbor husband rolled his eyes a lot, but the wife was very sympathetic. I kept saying, in Spanish, "My husband is going to divorce me!"

Here is what I climbed over.

Of course, it turned out that VW DID have the second set of keys. They had fallen behind her dresser. And we got one of the groundskeepers to get us a copy of the gate key.

As a result, we all thought leaving that door open was a good thing. I said a few times that I thought it might be risky and that Carlos had been robbed once via the roof, but The Spouse thought the chance was slim . . . and sure enough, someone did come in and took The Spouse’s eye glasses, his watch, and $200 dollars from VW's purse. We figured it was probably a kid who lives there, and he only takes what he can put in his pocket and that cannot be identified . . .for example, he was not interested in the passports. Luckily, I had my wallet and camera and eye glasses all either with me, or hidden in places one would not normally look (like in the pillows). So it was a dumb mistake and our dumb fault, but nothing serious, really. The Spouse had extra glasses . . . the missing ones, of course, were Dolce and Gabbana, but what can you say? The thief had taste! Because VW had the master bedroom, the thief looked there first and that is why he got her cash. Our room looked like it belonged to the teenagers, so he obviously did not spend a lot of time there.

It was all odd, however, because we did not realize for a day or so what had happened. The Spouse had walked into town with his glasses, but then he couldn't find them and he couldn't find the case either. I tore the apartment apart, looking in the furniture and under the furniture, and in the refrigerator. We went over and over the possible scenarios and had just about decided that I might have accidentally scooped them up in a towel and then dropped them in the garden, when we realized that a drawer had been open in an odd way in our room. And then The Spouse said, "Come to think of it, I can't find my watch either."

So we asked VW to check her room. She recalled that her purse had been in a different place, but thought maybe she had tossed it carelessly or maybe even one of the girls had been looking at it, although she thought that was out of character. She checked her wallet and saw that her cash was gone. AH HA! Then we figured it out.