Monday 11.15.2010


Driving Days

When we first planned this trip we were trying to find a creative way to get from Granada to Barcelona and then on to Madrid. It is a long drive to Barcelona from here so the plan was to split it into two days and then turn in the car at the Barcelona airport and three days later, catch a cheap flight to Madrid. The issue is where to stop between Granada and Barcelona.

The obvious is Valencia but with two long driving days we wanted to keep it simple and opted for a little hotel near the highway with a restaurant and free parking in Denia on the Costa Blanco. Mid-trip we got an email from the hotel saying they were closing for five months for renovations and wishing us luck. After scrambling for a bit we were able to book a room at the number one ranked B&B in the area, Casa Les Olives, a few minutes from the highway in the little village of Benigembla. No Problemo.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The rain washed the air last night and we have our clearest morning yet in Granada. Hello to Catarina, plenty of juice and coffee and meats and cheese and cereal and fruit, and a Manuel who can speak a little this morning but is still struggling with his cold. He tells us to let him know when we are ready to leave and he will drive us out. Amen! It is a team effort once more getting the luggage into the car and the master takes over nudging the car from the garage and turning into the street that is inches wider than the car. Manuel then takes us on a roller-coaster three-mile ride through the city going down to the bottom, swirling around in circles and then back up the hill to the Alhambra. He drops us off a block away from where we started but you can’t get here from there. We shake hands instead of kissing (and head for the hand sanitizer) and thank him for providing a brilliant property.


Monique, GPS chick, surprisingly accepts the address for Benigembla and gets us on our way. Not to be outdone by Manuel she is determined to drag us screaming through a maze of Granada city streets before letting us escape onto a form of highway. Because of the distance, we have allowed motorways (not toll roads) to be included in today’s drive and that is where we will be most of the day. We have also programmed in the Barcelona destination so we can decide when to get enough gas to reach our final destination. The car came with a cup of gas in it and we would like to return the favor.


It is a pretty drive mostly east towards that coast and then sweeping north along the water. We are in “sierras” when we start and the terrain is pretty rugged with fifty-mile views through valleys. That eventually gives way to the flat plain that is bordered by the mountains on the left and Mediterranean on the right. Closer to the water we are back in orange and olive groves and thousands of acres of various vegetables. When we have about 150km to our destination and 600 to Barcelona we stop to fill up with gas and nibble on our lunch of potato chips and crackers (we had a big breakfast).


We assumed that Valencia would be the major city of this area, but it seems that the power lies with Alicante. This is where the major airport resides and seems to be the hub of a massive expansion of touristy condos and hotels along the Costa Blanco. Once again we are getting English radio stations so we know who is here.


Above Alicante and below Valencia we are spun back to the west for about fifteen minutes to our stop for tonight. This is rural, semi-rugged hiking country and that is the draw in this little village. After waiting about ten minutes for a truck to unload and clear the road in front of us (yes that is common) we park in front of the post office and walk around the corner to our B&B. The door is open but no one is around. We see our paperwork sitting on the table so we check ourselves in before our host Nick comes tripping down the stairs. He makes up for his tardiness with a welcome beer. His mom Judy also comes popping out. She is visiting from England and is going home tomorrow along with Nick who is returning for a visit.

We have a nice chat as they acquaint us with the details of the village. He normally does a supper, but since they are leaving in the morning he gives us directions to the local bar/restaurant. Nick is a hospitality professional who has worked in the hotel business around the world and bought this place five years ago because he liked the peace of the village. Now he’s a bit tired of it and ready to sell and get back to England. He tells us that most of the locals speak English because there is some connection to a factory in Connecticut where at least half of them have gone to work for a couple years.

Mary has some postcards to mail (what a shock) so we go around the corner to the Tabac to buy stamps (the post office doesn’t sell stamps), but they are closed until 5:00 and it is 4:50. We decide to walk around the town, which gets us back to the Tabac at 5:05. Still closed. We go the other way, find our restaurant for dinner tonight and at 5:15 the Tabac is now open, but no stamps. They are currently out of stock, but as far as we can determine they will have more next month.

Mary reads and John does some computer work in the supper room (fire going and Getz/Gilberto on the sound system). At 8:00 we walk to the restaurant and find that there has been a tragedy. The father of the host/owner died today so he is gone and has been replaced by his father-in-law who speaks no English. Nick, Judy and a friend are eating at another table so they help us through the process. We both have the menu del dia including a tuna omelet appetizer, grilled chicken breast with baked tomatoes and eggplant, and John has a fantastic flan topped with honey and Mary has a so-so cheesecake with fruit. This is all washed down with a bottle of red wine. Total price 16 euros. For both of us. Combined with our “included” breakfast this morning, our chips and crackers for lunch, this dinner is very helpful with our food budget for the day.

We beat our hosts home and listen to the church bells from our room. The bell tower is 30 feet from our third floor room but Nick has assured us that they end at midnight and don’t start again until 7:00. And we were worried they would disturb our sleep. Every day is interesting.

Today’s picture: A final look at our room in Granada, the two windows on the left of the picture. We liked that place.

Sunday 11.14.2010


The Alhambra


It is only slightly less perfect this morning with some low overcast and fog reducing the value of our million-dollar view. We’re moving a little slower as we hobble down for breakfast after our marathon-hiking day yesterday. Catarina is smiling as always and we quickly use up her English and our Spanish vocabularies but breakfast is good. Our host Manuel is speechless this morning, as in laryngitis. He has been sniffling and coughing the last few days so we wonder when it will hit us. Barcelona or Madrid?


This afternoon is our Alhambra visit so we don’t want to kill ourselves before that. We hike down into town and do the arm-in-arm Sunday morning paseo along the tree-lined boulevard with a few hundred other couples. We also get into the cathedral for Sunday morning services. This is allegedly smaller than the Seville Cathedral, but because it is not as segmented it actually seems larger.


There is rain predicted for later and we know we will not want to walk back down here to find a restaurant after another hiking afternoon, so we go in search of a couple sandwiches and perhaps a bottle of wine to have in our room later. We know all the little shops will be closed but we have hopes for a supermarket we found while lost yesterday. Nada. Nothing is open today so we are considering our options when we walk past an Irish Pub that has a lineup of sports events in the window. Lo and behold at 19:00 this evening it will be the Bears-Vikings of American Football. Problem solved. With that taken care of we can hike back up our hill to relax for a couple hours before our tour begins.


We have been referring to our Alhambra tour for over a week and it is a pretty big deal. We won't go into the detail of the tour here - there are plenty of places to get great information if anyone is interested. We will mention a couple of things about the tour and the property in general.


La Alhambra is one of the most visited sites in Spain with as many as 8,000 people per day. It is the ancient palace of the last Moorish civilization in Spain and the final holdout in its struggle with the Christian monarchs to the north. To get in you have to get a ticket with a morning or afternoon time slot that allows you four hours on the grounds. You must also specify a half hour period during your morning or afternoon in which you will enter the palace. You can then stay in the palace as long as you wish or until your four-hour slot is finished. When we got our tickets in Ronda (from an ATM?) we asked for a Sunday afternoon and it specified 4:00 for the palace.

Our time slot begins at 2:00 so we wait until 2:15 to avoid the opening rush and then walk up the hill and find our gate. The audio tour has been recommended so we find the appropriate rental counter and get programmed in. There is also a Matisse exhibit of his works created during the period from 1910-1920 that were influenced by his visit to the Alhambra and we start there. We are certainly not art devotees, but the work is interesting and a good beginning to our tour.

We have been to Versailles which is perhaps the most palatial of the European royal palaces, and it is very much a palace from a "let them eat cake" point of view. We royals live here, the horse are there, the gardens are right behind, the swans are where they should be, and we'll try to find a place for the servants to bed down. The Alhambra, on the other hand, is an all-inclusive enclave of fortress, palace and medina with gardens, fountains and courtyards here, there and everywhere. The palace walls are a mile and a half around and at one point a couple thousand folks lived inside. It is shaped like a ship on the highest hill in Granada with the fortress, Alcazaba, as the prow, the Palacios Nazaries and the Medina occupying the center, and the Generalife gardens in the rear. Joining and atop the original palace is the Palace of Charles V who as conqueror had the right of one-upsmanship.

Unlike Versailles which was very formal, the Palacios Nazaries is soft and comfortable with intricately carved walls, ceilings and doorways, decorative tiles, and water and shrub filled courtyards. There is a much greater feeling of peace and serenity as you wander about and imagine life a thousand years ago. When many people around the world were still wearing skins and living in caves, this was a very civilized place. Unfortunately for him, the last resident of the original palace didn't fare any better than the handsome couple at Versailles, but at least he was hustled off to Africa in 1492 with his head still attached. We won't do a room-by-room here, but if anyone is interested, we have tons of pictures and there must be a DVD somewhere.


We finish our slot at 6:00, take a half hour break and then continue down the hill for the football game. We grab a couple of Murphy's from the bar and get settled in a back corner near the toilet with a little TV. The bartender tells us that there is usually a crowd of American students that come in and they have to put American Football on the big screen, but not tonight. It is raining a little and there is no food to be had here so John scurries across the street where he finds a couple slices of pizza which we wash down with more Murphy's. There is one kid from Atlanta who comes back to chat and catch the score but he is really watching soccer in front so is not to be trusted. Stupid Vikings! We leave after the third quarter and the game decided.

It has stopped raining and we make our final walk up this hill overlooking the city. What a nice stay!


Today's Picture: One of the many courtyards in the Alhambra

Saturday 11.13.2010


Granada!!

We may have mentioned how nice our lodging facility is. It still is this morning with the sun coming up behind the mountains bringing daylight slowly across the city as we watch. Catarina is our breakfast chef this morning and we have the usual assortment of meats, cheeses, cereal, yogurt, coffee, fruit and, of course, all the fresh squeezed OJ you can drink. Manuel pulls out his map to give us a walking tour for the day which looks simple in two dimensions.

We laze around until 11:00 knowing that five or six hours of hiking will be more than enough on this terrain. We start by going uphill around the exterior of the Alhambra walls on beautifully wide, wooded paths and after ten minutes loop around to begin the downhill portion which will take us down to the river. The walk past the original thousand-year-old walls is relatively steep and lined with stones, some of which are loose and some damp and slippery. We think that if this path were in Minneapolis all the children would have to wear helmets to walk down.


At the bottom we have the option of waiting for a little red bus to take us up the other side into the Albayzin (Moorish Quarter) or we can start walking up. Being relatively fresh we start the climb and about halfway take a detour into the Sacramonte neighborhood. Here the houses look normal from the front, but because they are built on a steep cliff, they are literally caves that are dug back into the hill. This area is supposedly now populated by the Romas (generally eastern European “gypsies”) but we don’t see a lot of folks out.


Our hike continues uphill to the San Nicolas viewpoint that overlooks most of the city with great views of the Alhambra on the opposite hill. We see a million pictures of the Alhambra at sunset and this was where they were all taken. St. Nicolas Square is not only home to the church of the same name, but also a Muslim Mosque. We walk the gardens of the mosque but, of course, the building itself is not open to the tourists.


Farther uphill is Plaza Larga where a small market is in full swing with a lot of locals and tourists milling about. From there we go up Calle Agua, a former street of Moorish baths, straddling the indentation in the middle of the street that was used for drainage. We loop around a few more blocks to Mirador Cristobal for a different angle of city views. We can almost see our place below the Alhambra, maybe.


From there we begin the long walk back down that takes us through more Moors, current Moroccans and lots of hippies into another couple streets of tiny shops selling hookah pipes, tea sets and harem pants. This eventually spills out onto Plaza Nueva where we had lunch yesterday. We decide to keep walking a bit further up the river that flows into town on this end and out on the other but is submerged below the city in between. The day has turned warm (mid-seventies), it is sunny and it is Saturday, so there are a million people on the streets. After plodding along with the crowds for a half-mile the street opens into a square of cafes with outdoor tables. A good time to stop.

We get a table in the shade, watch the entertainers and have a beer and lunch (Mary a salmon and cream cheese sandwich, John the chicken fajitas). A little Benji type dog has adopted us and stares at us with the occasional bark while we eat. He eventually discovers that there is slim pickin’s here and moves elsewhere.

For the rest of the afternoon we wander the commercial areas of downtown and eventually wind up on the other end where the river reappears. We are a little surprised to see it since we have no idea where we are, but it will be a nice landmark for us. As we turn to home on streets that stop and start and dead-end without warning, we have to pull out the map at every corner to take a new reading finally getting to the square at the bottom of our street. We are whipped by the time we get back up to our room. It is almost 6:00 and we have been walking up and down hills for seven hours (minus one for lunch) and we find that it isn’t getting any easier.

It feels great to get our feet up for an hour or two and watch another great sunset. Manuel makes dinner reservations for us tonight at 8:30 at the little restaurant right up the hill, Carmen de San Miguel. It is very nice and we get a window table overlooking the city that seems very familiar. John has the specialty of the house, the suckling pig with a vanilla puree and prunes and the meat is the best ever. Mary, breaking out of the box, has a pretty rare venison loin with a mushroom wheat risotto that is dynamite. This is in our top five meals of the trip, but alas, it takes a half hour to get the bill when we are finished. They just can’t figure that part out.

It is nice to have a hundred-yard walk downhill to get back tonight. We’ll probably hurt in the morning.


Today’s picture: Another view from our room of the sunset over Granada. Did we mention that we like our room here?

Friday 11.12.2010


The Home Stretch

Everything we do now leads us back to Madrid and our flight home in 11 days. John goes up to the terrace to check on our laundry and finds it neatly stacked and folded in a little room off to the side. It makes for easy packing this morning as we just put piles directly into the suitcases. We ordered breakfast last night for 9:30 this morning and Ian is busy with sausages and coffee when we return to the rooftop terrace. It is cool but the sun feels good and we have mountain views in one direction and the Mediterranean in the other. All of the roofs here as well as other places we have stayed have hot water tanks and solar panels installed to take advantage of all the sunny days. Probably not a reasonable option for northern Minnesota.


After breakfast we take another walk around town as Mary continues the great postcard shopping tour of Europe, followed by the continuation of the post office stand-in-line-for-one stamp tour. Ian is making beds when we get back to settle up our bill. Jane is off running around today so he says he is adding brownie points to his account. We were a bit worried about this place as it is a fraction of the price of other places we have stayed (35-euros/night) but the room was fine, the location ideal and our hosts couldn’t have been more accommodating so Cheers! to Hostal Miguel.


This is the last of our short-drive days leaving the coast right around noon and due to arrive at our next stop, Granada, in less than two hours. We are taken aback as we start to climb north to see snow on the mountaintops ahead of us and wonder what we’re getting into. There is snow predicted for home tomorrow so we thought we were finally going to be on the plus side of that ledger. We fire Monique when we get to the city as directed by our host for tonight, and follow his directions around the ring road to the Alhambra exit. We then squeeze down a dead end street, park illegally in front of a restaurant hanging over a hillside and walk down the last 100 yards to our lodging.

When we ring the bell, Manuel hustles down to meet us, gets our car keys, turns us over to Catarina for check in and disappears. A little bit later we see our car inching through a turn into a little garage three stories below us. When we climb down to get our luggage the driver is still only halfway in and takes another five minutes to make it all the way. We suspect that is why Manuel didn’t want us to park ourselves. A different person was parking the car (designated parker?) so he, we and soon Catarina and another helper all get our luggage up to the room and we’re settled in for three days.

We are staying in Granada in a Carmen. A Carmen is a traditional house from the Moorish period that encompasses terraces, gardens and orchards within a walled sort-of small area in the midst of a tight urban setting. Ours happens to be on the hill rising above the old Jewish quarter and on up to the Alhambra right above us, and it is unbelievable. If we look left and up we can see the walls of the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada Mountains beyond, and if we look straight or right and down we see the city of Granada spread out before us with more mountains beyond. The room is perfect; clean, spacious, with all the amenities, the gardens and terraces are classics, the public rooms are bright and tasteful, and the staff is very accommodating. Our streak continues.

The only bad news is, like Lisbon, we are built into the side of a hill so everything is either up or down. We opt for down and head for the Plaza Nueva for our now traditional mid-afternoon lunch. It is only about a fifteen-minute walk down the hill but suspect that it may take longer coming back up. Mary is making noise about eating in our big-time room tonight watching sunsets and twinkling lights and that sort of thing, so John thinks he should order a big lunch. He has an egg, ham and asparagus dish with salad and a beer on the side that is just right, and Mary has a tuna and roasted red pepper baguette with beer, all served at a nice sidewalk table under a tree.


After lunch we do a couple hour walking tour of this part of the city that loops around the Cathedral (2nd largest in Spain don't ya know) and into the crazy medina with shops spilling onto sidewalks with all sorts of Arabic finds. The large plazas all have a history going back over a thousand years when silk traders would park their camels near the fountains to tell the usual stories of traveling salesmen. If you let your imagination take over the whole thing comes to life and there are a few things that probably look the same today. Our walk continues through a part of the commercial area of downtown before we make a u-turn and start the return trip.

At a Pastelleria we pick up a box of empanadillas which will be dinner later and trudge back up the hill to our Carmen (Love it!). The sun sets at 6:00 sharp and we watch it disappear behind the mountains from the small terrace off our room. The lights start coming on while the 6:00 pm church bells are still chiming and soon the whole city is twinkling below us. The night is turning cool so we take advantage of the situation by warming our empanadillas on the room heater and pop the top on a bottle of wine. At about 9:30 we hear drums down the hill and soon a marching band comes marching through our lower neighborhood visible for a few seconds at a time from the terrace. The band, and the moon, and the city lights, and our terrace, and the wine are all working their magic. Hasta Manana!


Today's Picture: The view of the Sierra Nevadas from our room.