Today in Alcampo I saw breakfast bars on special and thought ooh, good, a chance to stock up. I always stock at least 4 types of breakfast bars for guests, in case they get the munchies before they can get to the shops and stock up.
I’m beginning to wonder how long it will take before that automatic reflex disappears. I don’t need to buy loo rolls in bulk anymore. I don’t need six-packs of long-life milk (I drink fresh) or 12 packs of bottled water (I drink filtered) and I can walk past the special offers on bedlinen or towels, because I’m no longer in the hosting business and never again need to wonder what on earth was in the hair oil which permanently stained a pillowslip and put an entire set of guest linen off the usable list. Guests – hungry, thirsty, oily, infuriating or delightful – are literally no longer my business. The Casa Excéntrico has been sold, this month, eight years after I bought it in October 2017, and I thought I had completely come to grips with that until I found myself chucking breakfast bars into my shopping cart.
I’ve just deleted the Casa tab off this website. I wanted to hide it, get used to the idea, but the only option to lose the tab was ‘trash’. Ouch. The last eight years owning a small guesthouse – two guest suites, a shared guest kitchen – has been a fair chunk of my life. I’ll miss the income, I’ll miss some, most, of the guests – fun, zany, eccentric, charming, shy, borderline bonkers, hilarious, lonely, gregarious, adventurous – or recovering from life giving them a sharp smack up the head. The sour, greedy, or uneasily alarming, ones, I won’t miss, but they were very much in the minority. Many were house-hunting in the general area, and some who bought locally became genuine friends. I promoted the house as quirky, a bit peculiar, because frankly it was, and as a result nearly everyone who stayed embraced its oddities.
Twice the atrium and hallway were flooded by heavy rains – the first time, I heard my French guest running down the stairs as I struggled to slosh ankle-deep floodwater up the slight slope out of the hallway towards the drain and thought ‘complain all you like, mate, I don’t control the weather.’ Instead he seized the other heavy yard brush and wordlessly helped – his English was even worse than my French. Many of my guests were Spanish, back to visit family for special occasions, and out nearly all the time as a result. Very few of the rest were English, since when the English come to Spain on holiday they either take a villa or want to be walking distance from the beaches and not have to drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. Instead I had Americans wanting to explore ‘real’ Spain, and Canadians, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Egyptian, Vietnamese, Czech, Polish, Estonian, Swiss, the full range of Scandis, Italian, quite a few South Americans. Lots with pets, none with small children unless I was personally related to them. I didn’t ask a lot, since I couldn’t offer a lot (my listing said in large letters, no pool, no aircon, no TV) so guests tended to be young, or generally on a tight budget. Many were travelling alone, some very self-contained, some bursting to chat about the events of each day. They were hikers, cyclists, bikers, writers, students, house-hunters, explorers, restless or recuperating. My very first guest was Danish, 30-something, very good-looking, working on his Masters thesis, and asked diffidently if I’d ‘introduce’ him to the nearest bar. The older woman who’d sold me the house entered the bar a few minutes after we sat down, looked at him with huge interest, then leered approvingly at me. Neither she nor anyone else believed there would ever be any ‘real’ guests, that the house could possibly succeed, but then I never expected to live on its income, I asked only that it supported itself – paid its own overheads and, so far as possible, its own ongoing maintenance, and it did. The pandemic was tough, but as soon as any guests at all were allowed, I could advertise that they would be the only ones at any one time. As lockdown lifted, stage by stage, I had my busiest year to date. There were, over the years, several hundred guests and I kept detailed notes on every one. At first I thought of that as research, maybe a book in it, but some were definitely stranger than fiction.
I won’t miss trudging up and down those stairs with their high risers, or the cleaning, or ironing guest linen. I certainly won’t miss the few crappy guests – one bad guest effortlessly outweighs ten, twenty, lovely ones. The buyers are Spanish, and will continue to run it as a guesthouse, I suspect rather more efficiently and luxuriously than I did. They’re significantly younger, so have much more energy and more enthusiasm than I can drum up, these days. I have no idea if they will play up its eccentricity, as I did, but you know what, if you get a chance to stay there, do let me know how you got on. I’m settling comfortably into my little house (in its own ways, just as quirky, I think it must be me) but I’ll miss the Casa Excéntrico for a while yet. In its own quiet way, it was a great adventure.
Quite Contrary 