Archive | September 2016

For the one or two of you that might still be receiving notifications about my blog, at long last here’s an update! After I left you hanging last year in Portugal, Nancy and I headed to Merida, Spain. Merida is in western, central Spain on Autovia A-66. Also known as Ruta de la Plata, it runs north / south, close to Portugal, from Gijon on the northern coast to Sevilla in the south. Total length is 809 km or 503 miles. We drove north from Sevilla to Merida, stopping on the way in Zafra. The towns along A-66 are relatively small and do not get the crowds of tourists of the larger cities.

Zafra

The Alcazar or fortress in Zafra was built between the years of 1437 and 1443. It is now a Parador, part of a chain of very nice hotels owned by the Spanish govenment.

Merida

For Roman history and archaeology buffs, check Lonely Planet’s Merida webpages:

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/spain/extremadura/merida

Moyglass, Enniskillen, Ireland

From Merida, we drove back to Sevilla and flew to Dublin, Ireland. We stayed there a few days and then took a bus to Enniskillen. There we stayed with John Spence and his family at the Spence ancestral home. Edward Spence was Nancy’s great-grandfather. Around 1870, he emigrated to America and traveled to the West. He became a mining engineer and lived in numerous mining towns. Golden City, CA, (about 20 miles from our current home in Copperopolis), Virginia City, Nevada, Contention, Arizona (near Tombstone) and eventually moving to Los Angeles, CA. The Spence ancestral home, Moyglass, has been in the Spence family for over four hundred years. We then flew from Dublin to San Francisco on Aer Lingus, Ireland’s airline.

Monkey Puzzle tree. Native to Chile, planted on Moyglass grounds. So named because an English observer said that it would “puzzle a monkey on how to climb it.”

Mountain Ranch, California

Last September 2015, the Butte wildfire burned over 75,000 acres in the Sierra foothills about 100 miles east of the San Francisco bay area. We owned a 41 acre parcel that was completely within the burn zone perimeter and entirely burned.

Before:

After:

Calaveras County had a fire clean-up program where they sent clean-up crews to burned properties. The crews cleaned-up all of the burn debris and any toxics left in the soil. Fortunately for us, our Mountain Ranch neighbors, whose parcel only partially burned, were interested in buying our parcel. The easement to our property cut through their two properties. Buying our property allowed them to complete an 100+ acre parcel.

After the fire, Nancy and I started looking around other parts of Calaveras County. In February, 2016, we purchased a house on 1.3 acres in Copperopolis, about 1 hour from Mountain Ranch. Copperopolis is 12 miles west of Hwy 49, just off Hwy 4. Copper was discovered here in 1860. The mine is gone but the old town and a “new” town are here now. Lake Tulloch, Pinecrest, Lake Alpine and many other lakes are nearby. We sold our house in Albany and moved to Copperopolis in May, 2016.

Copperopolis, California