heatwave – Dan Q

Three(ish) Weeks In Spain

Ruth, JTA, the kids and I are all back in the UK¹ after a three week period during which some or all of us were consistently in Spain. The whole adventure was the kind of masterpiece of epic planning that only Ruth could have pulled off, and it worked spectacularly².

A fawn-coloured French Bulldog lies comfortably on a blanket on a sofa, with her tongue sticking out in a large sideways blep. — I wasn’t around for the first week of the trip, but continued working from home (with the dog, pictured) as per the usual.

San Sebastián

Through clever permutations of remote-working from overseas (mostly by Ruth) and overlapping/intersecting stretches of annual leave (mostly by JTA and I), we were able to avoid having to send the dog to the dogsitter for a block of more than a single week³, didn’t need to break the bank on our collective leave budgets, and managed to give the kids the longest possible block of continuous immersion in the language and culture of Spain.

In the first week (when I wasn’t there), the kids got to take a mixture of surfing classes and Spanish language lessons in San Sebastián, among other activities. The Bordeaux wildfires caused some travel chaos for the others getting there, but they made it work in the end.

Tarragona

Later, I flew out to meet up with them and we switched to the opposite coast of Spain, staying in a delightful little villa North of Tarragona. The summer heatwaves that are affecting the continent made the middle of the day especially oppressive, so we did as the locals do and sensibly sheltered indoors during the hottest part of the day… but the kids in particular were glad to be able to take a dip in the pool to cool off.

Under nearly-cloudless skies and surrounded by trees and olive and grape-laden slopes, a stone villa and its outbuildings sit prominently under the bright sun. — The villa was a lovely building in a fabulous spot, nestled among hillside olive groves and vineyards, but the lack of wired Internet access/WiFi plus the signal-blocking stone walls made it more “disconnected” than we’d anticipated⁴!

As has become my tradition when travelling and on family holidays – because I’m an earlier riser than most, but also because I wanted to make the most of the coolest part of the day – I got out early most days for a whole bunch of geocaching expeditions⁵. But once others were awake we found plenty of other opportunities to explore the area.

Wide/panoramic view from a pagoda-like tower, where a woman and two children lean over a railing to look at a network of bridge-linked islands in a lake below, dotted with palm and other trees. — Parc Samà‘s breezy towers and water features took some of the heat out of the day, when we visited its attractive botanic gardens.

Having come from, remarkably, a similar level of temperature and humidity in the UK, I was interested to see how much greener everything was here on the Mediterranean coast. The plants here, better-adapted to hot and dry summers than those that we plant on our little island, were clearly more-suited to these kinds of conditions. Is it perhaps time that Britain started ditching her lawns and other year-round thirsty vegetation… instead planting more tropical-adjacent plants to provide shade (and carbon capture!) as the climate continues to shift?

A freshwater turtle pokes its head out of blue-green water near a rocky shore, with small black fish visible swimming in the depths. — This little fella had the right idea about keeping cool.

I enjoyed that we were able to split out time between a diversity of activities. A week-long jaunt can be dominated by a single activity – a skiing holiday, for example – but by the time you’re spending most of a month exploring a country, you want to be able to mix things up a bit, right?

A Roman aquaduct spans a forested valley. — Per local legend (and in common with many similar spans around the world⁶, which usually share a myth about the devil aiding in its otherwise-impossible construction in exchange for the first soul to cross it and then being tricked when an animal is sent across first), the Ferreres Aquaduct is also known as Devil’s Bridge, which lead me to observe that of *all* the architecture I’ve seen with which Hell’s ruler is credited, this might be the best (nice work, Satan!).

Sometimes we kept it slow-paced and relaxing, like reading by the pool while the children invent splashing-based games or playing board games in the shade. Other times we explored history and culture, like our visit to the Ferreres Aqueduct, the Catedral de Tarragona, or the old Roman amphitheatre.

Two children wearing VR headsets and holding parasols, in the ruins of a restored Roman amphitheatre. — An augmented reality tour of the amphitheatre was both engaging and educational for the kids, bringing to life its long and complex history: did you know it *started* as an amphitheatre, but later was the ground of a church (commemorating Saint Fructuosus, who was executed there), *then* became a prison, and now… it’s an amphitheatre again: in addition to being a historical monument it’s used to stage concerts and things!

And other times still we even did the typical “British tourist in Spain” things, like a trip to the beach or an expedition out on a catamaran to swim in the sea while the sun set.

Dan, a white man, drips from a swim in the sea as he stands, holding a plastic cup of white wine, on the deck of a catamaran. — I expected the catamaran trip to be a bit tacky, but it was actually lush. (I may have availed myself of the open bar, a bit!)

Obviously the biggest reason for our trip was to catch sight of the total solar eclipse as it passed over the region, and our villa’s garden/vineyard was without a doubt a superlative spot for this. We’d initially been concerned that visibility of the low-in-the-sky/close to sunset eclipse might be obstructed by the hills and that, therefore, we’d need to find another spot from which to spectate, but an early-in-the-week experiment of watching the sunset (with an eye on the clock) reassured us that this wasn’t the case. So – as long as we were lucky with the cloud cover – we should be set.

Dan sits on a sun lounger on a driveway, alongside a covered brick barbeque building. He's alongside two children doing the same, and all are wearing disposable eclipse glasses. — A particular highlight of the entire trip was hanging out as a family in our private vineyard, watching the solar eclipse.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great visibility of a total solar eclipse once before, in 1999, but honestly: this one beat it. The perfect location, the reds of the setting sun, the “moon illusion” exaggerating the perceived size of the moon as it approached the sun, the joy of vicariously sharing in the childrens’ wonder… all of these made the whole experience pretty mind-blowing.

The sun completely occluded by the moon. — You’ve seen pictures of eclipses before, but this one is mine. I maintain that even the *good*/professional photographs are poor substitutes for the real experience, though!

We watched, we awed, and then we saw the still half-obscured sun gradually disappear over the horizon. And then, a round of hugs and cheers and conversation later, we sat up late to enjoy the Perseids begin their nocturnal display.

Over the silhouette of hills, a total solar eclipse is just coming to an end, with a 'diamond ring' effect resulting from the sun's reappearance visible. — Mostly I was looking at the sky (through the safety of my eclipse glasses, of course). But I managed to snap a handful of photographs that, despite the limitations of my phone’s camera, came out pretty well.

PortAventura

After our week in the villa we delivered JTA to the airport to return home. Then Ruth, the kids and I drove on to PortAventura, perhaps our favourite theme park anywhere in the world. Since our last visit, the younger kid has reached a milestone of height that permits him to ride all of the largest rides, and he was excited to take advantage of this newfound privilege.

A man (Dan), a woman (Ruth), and two children sit in a circular boat on a 'river rapids' style ride. — A particularly useful thing about PortAventura compared to some other theme parks is that it’s *designed with heatwaves in mind*: it’s got lots of natural shade, cooling-off areas, and the right ratio of water rides for when you positively, absolutely need a good soaking.

Both the elder child and I were particularly excited to share with him my favourite non-looping rollercoaster, Shambhala. Shambhala is simply excellent: it’s a highly-vertical smooth ride with a free and open-feeling restraint that, collectively, give amazing “air” and a sensation of “flying” that’s hard to compare to almost any other coaster ride I’ve been on. I could sing its praises aplenty.

A man with a screwdriver repairs the restraint system on a rollercoaster car. — The second we reached the front of the line for our first ride on *Dragon Khan*… it broke down. But we got to watch it being repaired right in front of us, so that’s cute!

Going to Disneyland Paris and PortAventura in the same summer gives me the confidence to say: PortAventura is the better theme park. The rides, the theming, the food, the queue management, the accommodation, the value-for-money… it’s all better. So if you’re considering a European theme park trip and you don’t care about getting your photo taken with Goofy or whatever… PortAventura would be my suggestion.

PortAventura’s water park is good too, although it was pretty busy on the day we went. Their 30-metre tall near-vertical waterslide King Khajuna is a little intimidating⁷, but nothing our thrillseeking little man wasn’t up for.

Barcelona

Finally, we made our way to Barcelona for a “wind-down” couple of days at a hotel we’ve always enjoyed there. Aside for being mistaken for staff while I was using my laptop by the rooftop pool, there’s little of note to say about it: we took it easy, did as little as we could get away with, and generally “unplugged” before our journey back to the UK and a return to normal life (boo!).

Altogether a fabulous trip… and a really interesting experiment in a model that we could replicate if we ever opted for a three week (but drop-in/drop-out/telework) holiday in future. Though… I’d again want (our scheduling queen) Ruth to wrangle the logistics, because it gets complicated when there are so many moving parts!

Footnotes

¹ Although not in our house, of course, which is still being repaired following the flood in February; it’s now F-Day plus 191 days… more on that in a future blog post, I’ve no doubt.

² For a while, she was talking about trying to engineer it into a five-week expedition spanning both this and our trip to France earlier in the summer (to which JTA, the kids and I drove/LeShuttle’d, and to which Ruth flew following a work-related event in Austria: my, what a cosmopolitan life we’re leading this year!). But that’d have been an enormously more-complicated affair and I’m glad we settled on this “simpler” trip in the end!

³ Not that she cares: the dog loves hanging out with her little doggy friends, and is always excited to be taken to our dogsitter‘s, where she also “commutes” for a workday or two most weeks.

⁴ During out post-holiday ‘retro’ (because of course that’s what we do), the lack of connectivity appeared as both a negative and a positive on some of our lists! Obviously we’re all aware that a little digital disconnection is healthy and valuable, but sometimes it takes being in the middle of nowhere to impose the requisite self-discipline to keep off your devices!

⁵ Geocaching logs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (my 1000th successful find) – not that Geocaching.com can count that correctly! – 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37.

⁶ Obviously, the Devil’s Bridge nearest where I used to live and at which Ruth and I spent our first anniversary – back when we had no idea that we’d be able to make our relationship last… what…? 19 years this month!) – will always have a special place in my heart.

⁷ Reaching the top of King Khajuna’s tower, you can feel it swap in the breeze, and when you get to the slide itself its ‘horizon’ disappears precipitously until you shuffle completely up to it, at which point there’s little choice about your destination! While we queued for our first goes, we witnessed several people reach the top, change their minds, and turn back!

“You saved my life!” (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)

This weekend, my friend Liz arranged for some other Abnibbers and I to gather, with our families, for a camping/glamping weekend East of Oxford.

Here’s a story of something that transpired there, presented in three parts:

The fire
The battery pack
“You saved my life!”

Adults and children mill around a firepit, some of them holding marshmallows on skewers. — The campsite provided our large group with an entire field to ourselves, including spaces for socialising, a fire pit (at which the kids enjoyed toasting marshmallows), and a wood-fired hot tub.

The entire weekend would have surely been a memorable experience already, but one particular event will probably stick in the minds of everybody in attendance: the fire.

The fire

The UK’s in its unprecedented third heatwave of the year: the grass is all dying and everything is tinder dry. And so it was that, on Friday night as the kids and I slept in our glamping “dome”, I was woken by the distant beep-beep-beep of a domestic smoke alarm. A few seconds later, I heard a second such alarm with a different tone, and it became clear that this wasn’t just somebody’s toast on fire.

Not recorded: the sound of the occupant of this static caravan/cabin – having jumped through the window to safety as the front door was blocked by flames – on the phone to the fire brigade.

I went back into the dome to check on the children, which is when Penny knocked on my door to ensure I was aware of what was going on. The kids were sound asleep, so I ran out to the car park to move the car (which was parked in such a position that embers were raining down on it!) and to check on the situation.

I returned to the dome and got the children dressed. We evacuated to a safer distance and watched as the firefighters arrived and began to tackle the blaze. Short of water, they had one pump dousing the flaming building while two others relayed water from the nearest fire hydrant, way down the hill.

Eventually the situation came under control and we were all able to return to bed.

The battery pack

I spoke to Mike, whose holiday home was the building that was destroyed. He’d managed to escape with some shorts and his mobile phone, but little else: in particular, his car keys remained inside and were probably destroyed, which rendered him unable to drive back to his regular home.

A group of adults and older children stand out in a field at night, while in the distance thick smoke is illuminated by flashing blue lights. — The firefighters worked quickly, but it still took over three hours before they were able to finish spreading out and drenching everything that had caught light. We watched from a distance, and sheltered all the children (including those of a non-Abnib family on-site) in one of our tents.

Mike had been turning his phone on only in bursts in order to conserve battery for all of the essential calls he’d have to make (e.g. his bank, to extract some money without his cards, and a locksmith, to get him back into his car). His phone charger – an awkward USB-B-Micro one – hadn’t survived the fire.

But conveniently… I happened to have such a cable in my bag. Plus a fully-charged battery pack. So I lent both to Mike, in the hope that it’d make it easier for him to do all of the necessary administration¹.

A handful of metal frame struts stick out from an ash pile that was clearly once a static caravan. — It’s got to be a pretty-devastating thing to happen to your holiday home and everything in it. Mike was surprisingly chill about it when I spoke to him, taking soft-of an attitude of “well, there’s no point fretting about it after the fact!”

“You saved my life!”

Anyway: on Saturday night, shortly after the kids and I had turned-in, there was a knock on the door. It was Mike, come to return the battery pack I’d lent him.

The kids didn’t know who he was, so I explained: “This is Mike; he’s the fella who lived in the home that burned down last night.”

Mike handed over the battery pack and charging cable and, grateful for them, used a metaphor that. “Thanks,” he said, passing the hardware to me, “You saved my life!”

Several beds laid-out in a darkened glamping pod. — I hadn’t told Mike which glamping pod was ours, and just figured I’d see him around. Or else if I didn’t get my battery pack back, that’d be fine: it’ll have been more-useful to him than to me in the days to come! But there we were, in our pyjamas, when he appeared at our door.

He turned and left, and both kids sprung out of bed and exclaimed “You saved the life of the guy whose house burned down‽”

I’m sure they had in their minds the idea that, during the period between the fire starting and me waking and evacuating them, I’d singlehandedly dragged this dude out of a burning building. Y’know, instead of just lending him a phone charger after-the-fact.

I only let them hold the misapprehension for a few minutes, but for a moment it lightened the mood.

Footnotes

¹ I was already using my phone to call our insurance company before our flood, earlier this year, had finished. I can only imagine how inconvenient it is to suffer a disaster and lose your communications lifeline at the same time!

Can’t sleep, too much fire

An unexpected start to the kids’ and I’s glamping weekend last night when the static caravan behind our dome burned to the ground. We spent most of our night half way down a field watching the fire crews tackle the blaze.

(Nobody was injured; the residents were able to escape out of a window.)

Taking A Dive

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Dan Q / Curious Cones, in Taking A Dive

I had another submission accepted to Curious Cones last month; it remains one of my favourite silly niche blogs. This time around, it was this traffic cone seemingly about to take a dive from the low board at an outdoor pool (at which the younger kid and I were taking a respite from the heat!).

Not-accepted, but shared here for your enjoyment, was a photo I took while at West End Live in London the other week. I spotted a traffic cone on a shelf in the left luggage room at our hotel! I took the pic quickly and the room was dark and the photo came out blurry, so it’s fair that it didn’t make it onto the blog, but it’ll remind me to keep an eye out for cones in the most-curious of places!

How the European heatwave fucked me up

CW: reference to bodily processes, broad discussion of illness

This year’s “once in a generation” weather

Last week was brutally hot across Europe, with multiple countries recording their hottest ever temperatures. Others including the UK repeatedly smashed their record for the month of June.

While climate change is a global problem, it affects different regions in different ways, and Europe is disproportionately affected by hotter temperatures and heatwaves.

The “Chicory House” we’re currently living in has terrible thermal characteristics, so we took the advice of wiser folks about staying cool. We created a “cold zone” in the living room with a portable air conditioner and for a few days I lived, worked, ate and slept mostly out of that one room (along with the children when they were trapped home because their schools had been shut down).

Out of my London window; dome and spires and chimneys, mist and smoke (1890), by Joseph Pennell. A serene watercolor captures a bridge spanning across what appears to be a wide river, with a city skyline barely visible in the misty background. Murky reflections waver beneath the bridge, suggesting either the early hours of morning or a dusky evening. — Among the reasons described for Europe’s faster warming than other parts of the world is that we’ve improved our air quality so much. Maybe we should’ve kept the smog?¹

I thought our precautions would be sufficient, but I was wrong.

Heat exhaustion

After coming home from a shady morning dog walk on Friday², I felt hot and grumpy, tired, and incredibly thirsty. I pushed on through my workday’s Friday hotfix, then retreated to my bedroom for a nap.

This was a mistake: my bedroom is somehow the hottest room in the Chicory House.

On Saturday I felt dreadful. It was as if some tiny monster had discovered a switch: one that they could use, randomly and without warning, to toggle me from being a warm blooded animal to a cold blooded one and back again, intermittently wrecking my capacity to regulate my temperature.

Here: I made a simulator³ –

The Dan Thermoregulation Switch™️. Go on, you can flip it if you want. (Unless you’re in a feed reader or have JS disabled.)

I’d feel overwhelmingly hot but barely sweat, or I’d suddenly switch to feeling cold and shivering. A cool bath helped, but only for a little while: between going to bed on Saturday night and getting up on Sunday morning there were more hours during which I took a shower⁴ than hours during which I slept.

Water that I drank seemed to just fall straight through without touching either sweat glands or my bladder. Or else it’d come right back out the way it went in. Attempting to eat solid foods would result in hours of horrible abdominal cramps.

Clearly, I was quite unwell.

Opportunistic infection

If you’re looking at all of those symptoms and you’re thinking “wait, could this be heatstroke-related organ damage?”… then yeah, that was one of my concerns. I mean: I’ve only once felt more-ill than I did on Sunday… and that was over a decade ago when I was hospitalised with an antibiotic-resistant kidney infection.

I can’t claim that I wasn’t influenced by growing reports of long heatwave-related waits at A&E departments. If I have to sit somewhere uncomfortable, feeling rotten, then it might as well be at home!

An orange, sliced into quarters, alongside a glass of slightly-opaque water. — By Monday afternoon I’d graduated out of a fluids-only diet to one that allowed mostly-water food. Like oranges, served here with an oral rehydration therapy drink (blech).

But also: on the balance of probability, I figured I knew what had happened. I’d suffered a moderately severe heat exhaustion that’d weakened my immune response to some kind of opportunistic bacterial gastroenteritis⁵.

When it reached Monday, the monster had stopped flicking the thermoregulation switch (did you set it the way you think it belongs, by the way?), but my digestive system still just seemed to be in its degraded state. That is: just an inflamed and painful tube through which I could pour fluids.

I’ve produced what I feel is a more-accurate illustration of the operation of my digestive system right now.
With thanks to weareheroes for the icons, used under a Creative Commons license.

So I finally caved and saw a doctor, who prodded and poked me and said… yup, my hunch was right and I should go back to lying in the cool and living on fluids and come bother him again only if it doesn’t get any better (or gets worse).

If you’d noticed that I’d been unusually “offline” for the last few days⁶… well, it’s because mostly I’ve been lying in bed and/or groaning in discomfort.

But I feel like I’m moving in the right direction again now, and I’m optimistic that when I try solid food again today that maybe I’ll be able to digest it. Fingers crossed!

Lessons learned

So what have we learned from all of this:

Heat exhaustion is real, and it’s nasty, and it can leave you vulnerable to all kinds of other problems.
(Even when my guts are in pain) I can trust my gut feeling on whether or not it’s a medical emergency⁷. Please disregard any Aber Effect comic which implies otherwise.
You can probably be trusted with access the the Dan Thermoregulation Switch. You didn’t play with it at all!

Let me know below whether I was right to let you play with the switch. And look forward to hearing more from me now that I’m working towards feeling better again.

Footnotes

¹ Obviously this is a joke, but the world we live in nowadays means that I feel that I have to say so.

² It’s possible my heat exhaustion had begun to build up before Friday: Ruth observes that I reported feeling dizzy or lightheaded a couple of times during the week prior. But for the sake of the story, let’s call Friday the start of the problem.

³ If you can’t see the results of toggling the switch, it’s because I’m too far away from you to hear me groaning. Or maybe because it’s not that accurate a simulation. One of those.

⁴ Several times, literally lying foetal, exhausted, on the floor of the shower, only moving to tweak the dial to keep my body at the temperature I felt it “should” be at.

⁵ I’ve no idea how my relatively-isolated lifestyle exposed me to such an infection, but it’s quite possible that it was brought home by somebody, even me, whose immune system was working better and had it suppressed to the point of being asymptomatic… but with me exhausted and dehydrated it was able to gain a foothold. Or maybe it came from somewhere else. Perhaps I just need to stop French kissing the dog?

⁶ I was running a daily streak of 177 days of consecutive blogging – every day so far this year! – up until I got ill, so posting nothing to DanQ.me for four days… probably sounded like I was dead!

⁷ Sometimes it’s just bad sun tag-teaming with a bad stomach bug!