my personal timeline

Arcos, Giblatar

I’m exhausted. It’s been two very busy two days,and i know that unless i blog now it will all fly out of my head, but oh my god I’m barely able to type while lying down (with a glass of red, of course).

It looks like I stopped at yesterday, 10am. After salobrena we did a “long range” drive of 3 hours over to across de la fronterra, not jerez as i originally typo-ed. Drive was fun andverey picturesque. Spain has a massive number of windmills,which are super fun to watch. We even saw a solar panel farm.  

Ok, due go exhaustion… Point formish…

Arcos is a tiny town. We attempted twice to drive in, but it is so freaking narrow, ing and old that google maps completely mislead us, and we ended up parking and just grabbing essentials

Oh god i already typed his, must have been not in Tim’s notes app, arghhhh. Ok. 
Skipping forward because noway imagining up all of the above effort!

So! After typing up the myth on the weird computer, we shared drinks on our amazing, amazing patio. It wax the best hotel so far – you are above bird flight and above a massive ravine. 
The spectacular thing about the evening was watching a row of tiny steady flahes go across the horizon – many kilometers away (Tim says at least 50km away) – flash kn complete synch every second. It was eerie. As we figured out it was those windmills.

I woke up earlier in the morning to go and take some photos before the sun got too ugh – shockingly that was a success. Upon that we did the short hop between Arcos and Tarifa, except for a small mis navigation that gook us on a 30km street h of a no exits stretch of highway, arghhhhh. It all worked out though,and we got to our Rancho Relaxo,really named hotel Chillout Tres Mares. The atmosphere is awesome. Asian inspired, lounges everywhere, white sheets and dark town wood, small twin king lifts, perfection. It is slightly outside of the city, and it will allow us to stay 2 nights in one plisse in order to see 3 different countries – Spain (Tariffa), UK (Gibaltar), and Morocco (Tangier).

Sfter check in we dro r to G., whicsh was nice and easy. Minimal parking questions aside we did a pretty simple and predictable trip into G. 
Cable carried.
Monkeys.
Fish and chips.

Except that due to early rise, long drive, and exciting few days, my brain shut down around 3pm, so i basically zombied through the fish and chips, and relied on Tim on getting us home safe, he succeeded.

I’m already lettering out, and there is still Morocco tomorrow, so I’ll cut this short. Pictures will fill it all in! I hope.
    

 

Granada and Salobrena

First of all, the most important news. I am drinking a 2003 glass of “crianza”, red wine, in the most adorable town. 

Ok, now that that’s out of the way – I will continue where I last stopped, the landing in Granada. A tiny, adorable airport (large enough that I didn’t recall Thompson), we got super lucky and our checked suitcases were #1 and #2 in the roll out. I know everyone looked on jealously as I took the iPad and grabbed them – tim was outside for his smoke. After that nice little victory of checked baggage, we grabbed a taxi (pre negotiated price), and got to our really very pretty and nice hotel, called RoomMate. For some reason i keep thinking of it as room “maaah-they” instead of the normal roommate work.

The hotel is a tiny boutique, red and black decorated place, with super stylish chairs * and nice and comfortable rooms. //pictures will be available// we were exhausted, so we wanted to nap right away. Surprisingly , our room wasn’t made up, so we went on a little tour of exploration. It was quickly successful as we identified a lovely hole in the wall bar//restaurant across the street/corner. 

Leaving barcelona immediately shown a great side benefit.There is a south of spain tradition of giving small tapas dish when you order a drink. That means we constantly got to try misc dishes as we continue to drink our way through the country. This place didn’t disappoint and we soon were drinking white wine (at 12:05 mind you, so at least it was after noon!) and a beer. After that pleasant interlude,and another short walk, we went and had delicious 3 hour nap. Alas, we had. Ery deadline oriented plans of seeing Alhambra and the Nazreth gardens, where350 people are allowed to enter every 30 mins. If you miss your 30 min slot, you need to buy another ticket. Ours was for 5pm,and i was warmed of log lines to pick it up, as wells entry to gardens themselves.

The pickup went so well – there is anew system wheee you swipe your card and it gives you the tickets automatically. No line no fuss 3 minutes of effort.**          
The gardens and the castle were very cool, and very pretty.definitely a must see sight, but nice the lions garden is repaired. There were a lot of mind blowing parts about it – the carved stone and woodwork is really truly mind blowing. To quote our guidebook: “One phrase – “only Allah is victorious” – is repeated 9000 times throughout the palace.”

Photos etc upon arrival.

After the exhausting trip, we swung by the trusted bar and had a sandwich and more liquor before having some more downtime in the hotel room. I either napped or read. Tim napped.***

The evening was fun: we got up early enough to have dinner, late enough so that we were doing it with other people. Spaniards really do have dinner very late – no nod is out before 7-8-9 pm.

We had an atmospheric walk through int and narrow cobblestone streets, where sidewalks were nonexistent, and found a nice local place on a plaza/square, which we managed to finish and caught literally the last bus home. The bus driver kicked everyone off at some location reasonably close to our hotel,and when we asked the direction to the plaza on which we stayed he actually gave us a bit of a ride there. So sweet!

Morning was easy enough – packed our bags, walked around the city (ignoring the gypsies who continuously push twigs of Rosemary into your face in order to get you to stop and pay for a fortune. Coins are bad luck,so you can at the minimum pay 5 eu.) had some coffee. And then run into a palming snafu, where we waited for a bus for 50 minutes at the 30+ heat, and realizes that the bus is still an hour away. Ouch. Grabbed a car to the airport, chilled down, got the decent rental (manual of course), and drove south to Salobrena.

Salobrena is not mentioned in our guidebook – even wikitravel doesn’t say much about it. We got it through moms friend, N., who lives in Spain and gave us a list of places to visit when we skid for small sea side towns. This town tuned out toe so awesome that we are staying here anotherr night.

1. No tourists. Beautiful, whitewashed walls, and kids and dogsand tiny places and no gypsies and no shady characters.
2. Excellent room – in what was called a hostel but in rwality is a nice, smal, clean hotel. Balcony, neat room, good price.
3. Beach! Where we spent a few blissful hours reading, napping, tanning.
4. Great food! Our dinner was lovely and totally under what I expected. I had fish in butter and tim had steak and that plus fresh bread and bonus tapa.. Yum!z,z
5. Atmosphere. As we ate, we saw kids playing football, 2 dogs fighting****, locals hanging out,moms gossiping…
And last but not least….

The 2003 bottle that i am drinking was 2.95eu. I…. Am speechless. And its really really good!!! But.,, 2003??? Beer was 1eu.

So… Now to try and post this and continue our evening of relaxation. Plans for tomorrow include more reading, more wine, and more sun tanning. Yes! Vacation!

     

* one of my hobbies so far is finding Ikea things in public places. Only two or three so far have been without ikea. It’s fun. I even saw a painted “hidden” piece! Even hole in the wall Chitos had LACK shelves.
Anyway, this place had the – likely fake, since they were red – Mise Barcelona chairs. I didn’t even realize the relevance of the name until now! He designed them for the World Fair in Barcelona.

** I kind of dragged tim throguh a really hot hike up the stairs to get there, so the fags pickup was welcome. We had ice cream and coffee after that and life became better.

*** almost forgot! We picked up some wonderful 5eu wi ea d 7eu ham – that Gould tell you how amazing the ham/proscuitto was. The wine was spectacular too. Prior to nap both wine and ham were had. So good.

**** so the dogs. We see a pair of dogs run in, one brown and one black. Both cute, medium size. The brown one looks like its trailing the black one, and we are thinking the black one is the leader, until the brown one starts to try and hump the black one.eventually the black girl decides that this is not what she wants, and they start fighting. The entire courtyard of kids is cheering the different sides on, and after a very playful and amusing fight, the black dog chases out the brown one from the courtyard at full jetting speed. What blew my mind: 
1. We ate dinner at a table that was set outdoors in the courtyard where kids played the entire day.
2. Elegance, cleanliness, and grace of those dogs. Don’t think that they were homeless.