Yet another delicate start! 🙁 So didn’t make it to the ten o clock tram to Altea as planned and the eleven o clock was about twenty minutes late. Needed a cuppa when we arrived in Altea after a delightful train ride with views that were new to us.
All of which meant we made the market about twelve with an hour to get around the whole thing, not impossible. I bought another pair of pants and a replacement ‘man-bag’ as the current one is getting too floppy and tatty looking. Lynne enjoyed a good bit of retail therapy as an antedote for all this builder bid tension. Enjoyed the ‘tram’ ride back to Calpe as much as the ride there. The new trams are really quite posh and do raise it up from being a quaint narrow gauge railway. Got home about three, which gave two hours for a late lunch before the gardener and his builder came with their quote.
The quote was exactly for what we had asked including their additional suggestions but broke the bank by about 5%, which meant us subbing the work and there being no contingency left afterwards. Not a situation we liked at all. So then we called Monasor, our German neighbour’s builder to enquire about their quote as they hadn’t called as promised yet. We arranged to meet Abdellah at the house at about seven. Their quote was way smaller but digging into the detail they had not got all of the work included. Abdellah went around again and remeasured, and he seemed much more focussed on his own without his boss Candido with him. He promised to rework the quote by 11 o clock the next morning, so we agreed to meet with him again then. Felt despondent as we headed for our watering hole. We had hoped that they would prove the best. The mismatch had dented our confidence in them quite badly and we were thinking that it was break the bank time with Tristan’s guys, not a happy prospect.