Today, Thursday 26 October, is my last day in Yonkers, N.Y. I've been here for 10 days now visiting my mom who is ill with cancer. This afternoon she has another chemo treatment down at NY Presbyterian Hospital and I'm taking her downtown for it along with my sister, Julie.
This evening I fly back to Spain. I'll arrive in Málaga tomorrow around 12.30 p.m. if I make the connection in Madrid (why do airlines always make the time between connections so tight??). Ivan will be there to collect me at the airport and then it's off back to Júzcar.
We have guests coming into the hotel this weekend. I can't remember how many bookings we have but I know there are at least a couple. My hotel is called Hotel Bandolero and is located in the very small village of Júzcar in the mountains of the Serranía de Ronda, just 30 minutes away from Ronda, a very popular tourist destination, and only 45 minutes from the very popular and crowded Costa del Sol, the southern coast of Spain in Andalucia. Ivan is my partner of eight years and he is the chef. We've been running the hotel for just over two years now.
We arrived in Júzcar on 12 October 2004 so our anniversary just passed. It's been a crazy two years. I'd thought about writing about this experience in one form or another and recently thought "why not start a blog". When I mentioned it recently to one of our guests, she encouraged me to go ahead and do just that so here I am, starting my own blog.
This blog may just be a bit of therapy for me as well because this job, this business, this village (!).... can be very frustrating at times. It may be helpful to put the proverbial pen to paper and describe how things unfold, to describe the people of the village (I call them the 'Village People'), the problems we encounter, the red tape in this country (!) and just the day-to-day of running of a small hotel and how our business has been growing.
