Meier Front Hatchway U100 - Originally posted February 2006

A LOT has happened since the second update so I’ve actually put everything in two separate updates. Here are the third and fourth instalments of The Great Spanish Adventure.

I’ll start where I left off. Remember the bit about our stuff finally leaving Barcelona and being shipped to us. Good! Now remember I ended with “I’ll believe it when I see it”? Well, herein lies a very interesting and funny tale. The truck driver had called on Saturday and told us that he would be here around Tuesday or Wednesday, but he was a little confused because the shipping order said our shipment was 3000 kg, but it didn’t look like it should be 3000 kg. In fact our shipment was 300 kg. No biggy so they tacked another zero onto our shipping order. We’re not getting charged extra so why do we care. We were waiting and ready to go on Tuesday. He didn’t show, but he did call us again to tell us that he would be there around 8 tomorrow morning and that again he was concerned about this shipment because it was in fact quite heavy and he wasn’t sure his truck would be able to get onto a residential street as it was an 18-wheeler. Ok, again no biggy. We’ll just get him to drop it off at the bottom of the hill and haul it up one box at a time. We can even use the car. This guy worries more than we do. So sure enough we get a call at 5 minutes after 8 on Wednesday morning and we’re off to meet him at the front of town.

Now, before I go on allow me to divert with a little piece of history first. I guarantee it will make perfect sense in a minute. During the Second World War there was a German navy soldier named Meier. Meier was kind of a burly guy and often took a while to get through the hatch from the bridge to the control room on the ship. So one day his shipmates decided to play what they probably thought was a really funny joke. As Meier was going through the hatch on this unfortunate day they jumped on his shoulders and of course poor Meier fell through the hatch and followed through with an 18-foot drop to the floor. He did survive this terrifying experience, but developed a fear that his shipmates might try this again. In order to make sure it would never happen again Meier created a very sophisticated and fast system of getting through the hatch like “Grease Lightning” as his shipmates called it. It was named “The Dive” and the hatch was renamed the Meier Hatch which lives today for every hatch of this design.

Now, I’m sure you’re all asking why are you talking about a German soldier in WW2 and how do you know such a useless fact anyway. Well, because we researched it on Wednesday night the same day that we opened the back door of the truck drivers semi and were surprised to see a crate about ¼ of the size of our 25 containers that said Meier Front Hatchway U100 on the side at which point I turned to Miguel and said “I don’t think we’ll be able to get this up the hill”. First thoughts are funny eh? The driver was right. The shipment was in fact 3 metric tonnes understandably for a ship’s hatch which was meant for Bilbao, the ship building capital of Spain. We were right too. Our stuff is 300 kg, but never made it to Málaga. Apparently we were not as pissed off as the shipyard was to receive our Rubbermaid boxes full of picture frames and my grandmother’s lamps. I can imagine some big guy full of grease pulling out my fluffy purple sweater saying “Where the hell is my HATCH!”. So we made some phone calls and received one back saying that our stuff was BACK in Barcelona and would be here the next day at around 10 in the morning and again I say “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Sure enough the next morning, no truck, no call and no returning of our calls to find out where the hell our stuff is. We were starting to think that these guys were real professionals. I don’t know what tipped us off. By this time we were, well, livid! At this point we’re threatening to get everyone involved from the guy in Canada who shipped the stuff in the first place to the RCMP and INTERPOL. We did eventually get our stuff. Next Tuesday. I can’t be mad anymore. I can not express how great it felt to see our stuff finally. It felt like a victory of some sort.

That week was a busy week because Miguel’s DNI came in as well. That meant that we could claim the car that we had been driving for over 2 months and also insure it. What a novelty. The insurance was a little tricky though. You need to know what you’re doing because if you don’t you can end up paying an arm and a leg. The first guy we went to quoted us 1400 euros for the year. The reason being that my International Driver’s Permit is only valid since November so I would have to take the non-experience driver’s rate. I have a copy of my driving record which shows that I’ve been driving since I was 17, but it’s not valid for an International Driver’s Permit. We decided to try RACE which here in Spain is the equivalent of CAA. Our second quote was 340 euros for the year. We went with the second. They could insure me under my Canadian Driver’s Permit which meant my driving record was valid. YAY! So now we have a car to our name and we can get into all the accidents we want. Which is a definite possibility since the drivers here are all insane!

Right now our days are busy as we are getting our new place ready to move into. We have the keys, but we’re still working on getting the financing together. It is looking very good. It’s so weird how it works here. There are rules, but they are being bent or twisted all the time. We got kinda lucky because our realtor knows the director of the bank that we’ve applied to. The two of them are in cahoots and working to get us the best mortgage they can. We had the land evaluated last week and we’re just waiting for the paper work to go through and then we can find out how much of a mortgage we can get.

So one by one we check things off our list, but there are still so many things that still need to be done. We should be busy for a long time. Never a dull moment!