People coming and going

We had a guy named Christian come here from Slovenia on bicycle and a couple from Germany walking the Mediterranean. Soon after a guy named Jake also arrived here on bicycle as well. He's from England. Our community keeps growing. We've made a few adjustments with projects. One being the Cobb oven in the fireplace. The German guy Joe vanished from Island Bonita before finishing his Cobb oven. We decided to tear it apart and build it somewhere else. No use taking a perfectly good fireplace and turning it into a nonfuntional thing so we brought it back. Another thing was our showers. We were taking them in the pool area. Now we have 2 private showers and a communal shower. The drains inside the house work, so we heat up hot water and pour it into a water bottle with holes in it to take a shower. It works great. Nice taking a shower indoors. The communal shower is outside overlooking the ocean. Some projects are successful, some we adjust to make them better. Marcel , a guy from Germany, is a professional gardener. He finished landscaping our whole place. He took Seth around and showed him how to upkeep the grounds. Marcel is a traveler by bike and car and left us a few weeks ago. Along with the German couple, Christian, and Jake. Everyone left us with some cool paintings and good times. Both parties stayed for a couple of weeks and Jake for a few days. Great to have met them all.

Carnival

In Aguilas Spain, is held the biggest Carnival around. It consists of 4 big parades, 2 minor parades, huge party in the streets, costumes, drag queen showdown, fireworks, music, and food for two weeks long in the nighttime. The parades are filmed on TV and every costume is amazing. Each one is slightly different. They have a contest for the most beautiful dress made out of tissue paper. We went down to go watch it and found out that all the streets are blocked off by ticketed bleachers so you can't watch it for free. Luckily we found s spot right by the film crew and watched the parades for free. Parades are fun at first but over an hour or two I'm good on watching it. We all made costumes from pieces that we've gathered from around here and set out for the party night. Everyone was dressed up in costumes of all kinds. From group costumes to dressing up like Mexicans, to people painting there faces black for Aborigines, to Donald Trump building the wall. Anything you could imagine was presented. Little cars carrying stacks of amps with loud music blaring were cruzing the streets with dance parties following them. Some had small trucks with tons of amps and a trailer of people dancing. We found a spot with a live band playing and food carts all around. The party went until 4 am in the streets but we called it around 2. The food at the carts was just about everything. Burgers, fries, churros, chicken sandwiches, rice, no paella, and food I had no idea what it was. I had a churro coated in chocolate and filled with cream. Delicious. We had a blast at carnival and recommend going to it sometime.

Constructing

We had a Irish and German couple join us at Island Bonita, Melly and Richard. They are a beautiful couple with happy souls. Also they travel with a ferret named Hippy who all showed up on bicycles. Hippy is the cutest animal ever. We gather all together at breakfast or after dinner and decide what project to work on next. The compostable toilet has been a must. First we tried digging a big hole through rocks n clay and didn't get to deep. We put a pallet with a hole cut out of it over the dug hole. Worked but it didn't last too long before it filled up with having so many people. We then built a compostable toilet in a outside room out of a big bucket cut in half with a toilet seat ontop. Next to it is a bucket of mulch to add on top of when you go to the bathroom. Next, a compost area was much needed also to put our food waste in and we built one next to the compostable toilet outside. It has 3 stalls to make our food waste turn into compost for gardening. It's covered to keep it warm during the day and the rain water out. A cobb oven is being started in the fireplace outside by Joe using cement and ocean stones. Big advances. We had a family show up that we met on help ex earlier. They live a hour from here and showed up in a van. It was great for Seth since they have 2 boys. One was Seth's age and the other one a little younger. They got to play all day long and venture around. Fun for Seth to have some kid time. Sanson does tattooing and gave Richard and Ulrick  a hand poked tattoo in our outside fireplace room. Turned out amazing. Ulrick and Vincent gave Melly and Sanson dredlocks outside that same weekend. What an amazing place to walk around a see so much happening.

Cleaning up

Ulric and Vincent showed up to Island Bonita by walking from France with all of their gear. Julio also has arrived with us here by bicycle touring Spain and is from the north. He's been good about teaching us how to speak Spanish which is great. With a good amount of people we decided to do a over haul of the house and get all the debris out. With the donation money we got ourselves a shovel and started scooping up room by room. The biggest mess was the basement. It was covered in trash up to 2 1/2 ft. deep. All of us wore face masks and gloves and relayed it out to the main garbage pile. Hot showers all around after that one. Now all the rooms are swept and mopped. Now to get the trash officially off of the grounds. Joe and I had previously talked to the city council to get a trash can delivered and they said no problem. We were so excited and it never did come. Julio on the other hand, had tea with the main trash guy's and explained to them that we're trying to clean the place up. The very next day we had a industrial size dumpster outside our place. Now all the trash is vamooshed ( gone). It feels so good to have a clean environment. The dirty work is over.

Advancement

We had a lady from Scotland stay with us that had a caravan. Her name was Michelle. She helped us advance our place big time by picking up items we could use. We got a official front door for our living area and put it up using her drill. She also came with power tools. Michel is a sculpturist and made a fish out of wire and recycled beer cans. Also a donation of a gas camp stove with a butane tank was left by her. No more 1 to 2 hours of cooking on the fire. Fire cooking is nice n all but very time consuming. We now have a kitchen area made with a recycled door for our counter space and found wood that we made into shelves to store our food. Also a whole cabinet with shelves n such down below to store our cookware n dishes. Moving right uptown now. Even a mop and broom to wash all the floors n tile walls. Now it's feeling like home. We make community dinners and do community shopping. It costs us 5$ per person a week for food. Good deal to live in Paradise for 5$ a week. Can't beat that. Every day we collaborate with ideas and art. New paintings are being done all the time. New friends for life and some just passing through. We advance with the materials that we have and find. Taking some showers by setting a water bottle wrapped in black plastic outside to get hot in the sun. Then poked holes in the lid. One person squeezes it over the other one who's standing in the pool in their bathing suit. No wind in the pool, just hot sunshine and warm water. I still take the 2 euro hot shower in between times. I can live like this as long as I'm clean and my clothes are freshly laundered. Makes me feel civil at least. Each room in the house is turning into a art piece. Fun to see what's next.

Squating

I'm sitting here on the Mediterranean coast in Auguilas, Spain in a rock cave down below the estate that we're now squatting. The estate has 6 bedrooms, one indoor living room, outdoor terrace with open roof and a mosaic fireplace, and a indoor kitchen spot. Another spot to open a bike repair place and plenty of spaces for art galleries. The terrace has 12 or more garden beds with palm trees, a big pool, outdoor living space, garage, and many benches to sit on all around. We heard the place used to be a private party disco club. It's been abandon for 10 years. Here in Spain it's okay to squat a place out. No one minds especially if you are cleaning up the grounds. We picked up so much trash on the outside grounds all the way by the beach that we sit above. That was such an eye sore. Tourists and locals walk and jog a trail along the beach that goes right along the estates grounds every day. We cleaned out all the garbage, rubble, and glass from the inside of the place separating it into different piles. Next we swept and mopped the floors which have no damage to them so their beautiful tiles turned out. As we've been here cleaning this place up, other bicycle tourists have have stopped in to check the place out. We now have a German guy here, a couple from Australia and Ireland, Spanish guy, and a guy from Slovenia, and a Scottish lady all staying here. The weather here is perfect. It gets to the high 70's during the day. The sunrise is spectacular over the ocean and the sunsets over the mountains and palm trees in the distance. North and south of here is much colder. There's a under ground storage tank in the house that's collected rainwater as fresh as can be so we use that water to do our laundry. I fill up big water jugs with the top cut off.  Fill one with laundry soap n water and one just water to rinse the clothes. Ring them out and hang on a clothes line out on the terraces grounds. They dry quickly with the sun and ocean breeze. We do however take a 2 euro hot shower at a RV resort less than .5 kilometers away. Seth has a BMX bike course next door to the grounds beside the beach. It has jumps with ramps of dirt which he loves to go on. Seth has a wetsuit, goggles, and a boogie board so he goes out to a little beach right by the place and jumps into the ocean. We make community meals in the fireplace and do the dishes with fresh water from town. We're all doing art around the place. I'm making ceramic air dry pots for succulents and cactus and painting the outside of them, felt flower pins, and felt phone cases. Seth is making beads with recycled glass using his kitchen torch to melt them together and attach wire to it to hang from a necklace and making wire wrap shell and rock necklaces. Joe and others are painting and one is doing wire sculptures with recycled cans. We also have a spot where people can leave a donation for tools n such to help us build up the estate. People passing by have all been happy to see the changes. Donations have been left and it's been a positive vibe. For now we're settling here for the winter and will continue our bicycle tour in the Spring. I will try and keep updating with changes we make to the Isla Bonita, we named the place.