Before I go on, I'll give you the typical disclaimer that this is a substantially-long (by the way, I've started using the word "substantial" a lot for some reason) post. I'm trying to blog about the entire road trip in three posts, which means I have to cover considerable ground with the remaining posts. If you want the SparkNotes version, just scroll through the pictures!
Moving on. At this point of the journey, we were pretty excited to get to the place where we were staying for the night. We had found and rented a small house about a 30 minute drive from Gibraltar in Getares (essentially a small cluster of cliffside homes some minutes away from the city of Algeciras), and had paid a little bit more for this stay, as compared to our other three nights. To our delight, our home, on Calle Ortigas (Nettle Street :), didn't disappoint. Here she is!
Having the place for ourselves for a day was definitely one of my favorite aspects of the vacation. We were able to hook up some music to the amplifier, eat our food whenever we wanted, and lounge about in the living room or outside on the patio, enjoying the view of Africa. Absolutely loved it. Oh, yeah, our view! Take a look. That is, in fact, Morocco that you can see on the horizon, sleeping in the Mediterranean haze.
That afternoon, after considerable discussion and deliberation about what to do, we decided to head into Gibraltar and see what the British territory had to offer. We were thinking of maybe going into Gibraltar the next morning, but then realized the next day was Sunday and nothing would be open. Good thinkin'.
Here are some drive-by sights along the way. Oh, yes, in case you didn't know (I definitely didn't before coming to Spain), Gibraltar doesn't actually belong to the Spanish. It's a small chunk of land that's essentially a mini-Britain on the Mediterranean. British accents, red telephone booths, double-decker buses (or bus), and fish-and-chips. And we had to have our passports to get in (but it was probably the easiest border crossing of my life). I'm pretty sure I could have flashed a homemade cardboard passport and gotten in, as long as I painted it a blue somewhat similar to good ol' American Passport Blue. It also helped that we were on foot; we had heard from a couple different sources that driving into Gibraltar takes forever, so we parked a little ways away from Gibraltar in the Spanish border town described as "seedy" by the tour book Tori had, and then meandered our way south until we hit the frontera. Another interesting fact about getting into Gibraltar? You have to cross an airport runway, on foot, to get in.
Pretty neat, huh?
Our experiences that afternoon included but were not limited to: admiring the giant rock that protrudes from Gibraltar, using exercise/playground equipment whilst overlooking the port, watching the sunset, ordering fish and chips, and clandestinely eating fish and chips on a table hidden from view of the restaurant employees (because they didn't let you use the tables unless everyone was ordering something, and we just split a big fish-and-chips portion; it must've been quite the sight, seeing us hovering over the delicious fried goodness like seagulls at the beach on a July afternoon, yet crouching and peering side to side every 30 seconds to avoid detection by MI6). I was also a bit thirsty, so I bought a soda with Arabic writing on it. Turned out it tasted kind of like bubble gum. Never had I had bubble gum soda before that moment. Viva Gibraltar.
After the sun set, we set out for our car. Our bellies were a-grumbling, and the four frozen pizzas we had procured at Dia earlier in our trip were pretty lonely back at home.
That night we hit the hay and we hit it well, full of pizza (made on the panini maker, I should add, as suggested by the house's owner herself, as the oven was non-existent, and as this is a run-on fragment, and doesn't even have the merit of being a run-on sentence) and fully exhausted. We had decided beforehand that we'd be sleeping in the next morning: good call.
The next day was Sunday, so we had ourselves a slow calm morning, each of us journaling or reading for a bit in between eating breakfast and enjoying the view and sunshine. It was a really peaceful way to start the day, especially compared to waking up for school on the weekdays. Oh, and Tori let me have some of her Special K with Red Berries. That's a big deal, because Special K with Red Berries are worth their weight in gold.
Even the cat took the liberty of laying in the warmth of the sun for a couple hours.
After breakfast, we intended on finding a beach to spend the early afternoon on. We drove down our street towards the west for a bit to verify what we had been told earlier by Pascale's (the house's owner) husband/boyfriend (you never know in Spain…), that the beaches close by were all rock. Nonetheless, the view was pretty amazing. We also met a guy holding octopi and witnessed a Navy SEAL emerging from the water.
Our plan B to the rocky beach was a beach we had passed earlier (there was a picture earlier in this blog post of it), so we soon after headed out there. The next couple hours were full of a plethora of seashells, dogs of various types having a blast, some white guys swimming, snacking on Maria Dorados, and lazily-laying-in-the-sand types of behavior.
We had to check out of our house at 3, so when the time came we reluctantly left the beach and beelined for the house to grab our things and clean the place a bit before Pascale came to get the keys back. About a half hour later, we were heading out the door and on to our next adventure: finding our place for the night in the Marbella area. Rocinante seemed up for the task, as per usual (I don't usually same that; hmmmm...).
In the weeks preceding our trip, we had googled some of the cities along our intended route, and Estepona seemed like a great town to stop by. Glad we did! Though we had less than an hour to spend in Estepona, this quaint town was definitely one of my favorite locations on the trip. Reminded me a lot of Santa Barbara; I think that's why I liked it so much :)
We stopped to get ice cream at a waterfront shop as small as its Italian owner's national pride was large. He said that because his shop was a "casa italiana," the toppings were free, but in a "casa española" the same wouldn't be true. Definitely a character :)
I wish we could've stayed longer in Estepona, but we were once again on a schedule with the place of our stay for the night in Puerto Banus (some ten minutes from the city of Marbella), needing to arrive by 6 to check in. Well we pulled up to Puerto Banus at 5:45, found the street where Jardines del Puerto (our hotel) was, and dropped the girls off to quickly find the front desk before the hour ended while we parked the car. We ended up finding the gate to Jardines right at 6, and lo and behold it was closed and no one was in the office. Long story short, after panicking a bit and wandering about the place looking for employees, we found a number to call and were able to reach someone that was on the grounds of the hotel and could open our room for us (we later found an information sheet we had printed that had exact instructions for what to do if we arrived on a Sunday [which it was], because the office is always closed on Sundays; great :).
After settling ourselves a little bit and recovering from the momentary bout of anxiety, the five of us headed down to the beach, about a block away from our hotel, to watch the sunset. In a word: breathtaking.
The silhouettes above are our crew! And the silhouette below is Gibraltar. One of my favorite aspects of this whole trip was the continuity of going from place to place slowly, especially in the case of Gibraltar, with the enormous rock tying everything together. We could see the famous landmark from
Well, I need to finish a paper for Literature Española (we're in Mallorca right now; I spent the day hiking on the northern tip of the Island with Kane, Lane, Tyler, Jules, and Angeline) before we hit the sack for the night. Hopefully the next blog post will cover the rest of our road trip! Then I'll have to write about our short Toledo trip and this weekend in Mallorca, and then I'll be caught up on my blogging. Like that will happen anytime soon...jaja.
Good night (good afternoon/good evening) to all!
Tsa luego!
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