Barb and Baden’s Excellent Spanish Adventure – Final

The Rock, Cats, Monkeys and Nutella

Final Week:

We left Sevilla after picking up our rental car from the train station and headed south towards Ronda where we would be staying for the final week. About halfway during our two and a half hour drive, we stopped for lunch at a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant seemed to be one of those family run operations and the staff quite friendly. We were served by the ‘grandmother’ and as usual, they spoke no English but we seemed to manage communicating.

The woman was asking us if we wanted a salad and they gave us a choice of fish or meat. She then asked us if we wanted lamb by making the ‘baaaa’ sound which we ended up choosing. We were under the assumption that we were just getting a salad with lamb pieces but got a large salad with no lamb. The salad has other meat in it and was quite filling. After she took the plates away, she then returned with two other plates with the larges pieces of meat that we had ever seen. This is the type of thing that if she put on a tray on the side of our car, the car would tip over (Fred Flintstone style). We were able to negotiate splitting a single dish of the delicious lamb meal.

Before we left Vancouver, we had made all of the arrangements by email to rent the house in Ronda for this upcoming week. The emails that we traded back and forth (which we all in Spanish) essentially stated that we would call them before we reached Ronda and meet them at a gas station by the side of the road and they would lead us to the house. We had called them from Sevilla before we left and got only voice mail on the three numbers that we were given. I was getting the bad feeling that this whole arrangement had ‘fiasco’ written all over it.

To our relief, we ended up reaching Ronda and managed to reach the woman on her phone and ended up meeting at the gas station at the edge of town. We made it to the house without any further problems. The name of the house was “Los Garibitos” as its seems like a Spanish custom to have a name for a rural house.

The house was extremely nice looking and we drove through a series of almond a orange trees on the road approaching it. It was a renovated country house which would easily sleep about 7 people and had a swimming pool off to the side. We unpacked and settled in for a week of relaxation which was going to be just what we needed after the previous two weeks of running around seeing the sites. Barb had really outdid herself in booking this villa as it was just perfect.

We woke the next morning and discovered a cat sleeping in front of the door who was meowing obviously wanting to come in. The owners didn’t mention anything about a cat so we assumed it must be a neighbour’s cat. As soon as we opened the door, the cat walked right in and headed straight for the kitchen. We surmised that this cat had made a living getting well fed by tourists who stayed at the house.

We had a quick discussion about what we wanted to do while at the house. I told Barb that I wanted to do nothing and just unwind in our last week in Spain. Actually, I told her that in honesty, I *did* want to see Gibraltar and we could make it the one day trip while we were here. We ended up getting some groceries that morning to take advantage of the kitchen that we had here. We found a local supermercado and bought a week’s worth of groceries and about 5 bottles of good Spanish wine (three of the bottles were to take home). We were extremely surprised at how cheap the groceries were here and we estimated that it was about 40% cheaper that it would have been for similar groceries in Vancouver.

Next to the house that we were staying at, there was a small farm with a few animals. The first morning, we heard the crowing of the rooster next door in the early dawn hours. Only have lived in cities my whole life, my understanding of farm life is based on sources that most people like me would have used: movies and television. As such, I expected the rooster to crow at dawn and then everyone gets up and gets on with their day. This is only partly true. The part about the rooster crowing at dawn actually happens but it also crows 10 minutes after dawn, then 10 minutes later and then pretty much the whole day. While the crowing was kind of cute for the first hour, it was plain annoying by mid afternoon.

We decided that Monday was going to be our drive down to Gibraltar so we headed off on the highway through the Sierra Nevada mountains down to the Costa del Sol before heading west to Gibraltar. I had read somewhere that the highway that goes along the Costa del Sol has about the highest number of deaths in the world due to a combination of tourists driving drunk back ad forth from their hotels to the beach. We kept this in mind as we drove that stretch of road.

Because Gibraltar is a British territory, we had to cross a border from Spain so we packed our passports. While it is possible to drive into Gibraltar, we decided to park on the Spain side and walk over. Gibraltar is unusual for a number of things but most for the fact that once you cross the border crossing, you have to cross the runway of the airport to get to the main part of town. It’s actually quite something to have these gates be closed for all of the traffic for a few minutes while this huge jet either takes off or lands then the gates are lifted and you walk across the runway to the other side. I think that this is the only airport in the world like this where people have to walk across a working runway on a regular basis.

‘The Rock’, as Gibraltar is known as is quite a sight and of course has a fairly rich history (what with Admiral Nelson defeating the Spanish armada here and getting himself killed in the process). Lesser known that this famous sea battle are the Apes of Gibraltar. When Barb first told me about this before we left Vancouver, my first through was that it was some kind of bizarre place resembling the Planet of the Apes movies where apes were the masters and men were nothing more that sources of food and amusement. Ironically, this is pretty much what the Apes of Gibraltar is like. I’m not sure how this all started but there are these monkeys that live at the top of the rock and tourists (like us) spend good money to be taken up there so that the monkeys can steal food from our bags and otherwise not have to live a normal monkey life. For all of this, we get to take a few pictures of the apes. Under normal circumstances, the view from the top of Gibraltar would be quite spectacular and you could easily see into north Africa but there was too much cloud and we got to see pretty much nothing.

Other than the rock, there are a few museums in Gibraltar and about 500 tourist-oriented stores (mostly selling booze and electronics for the British as it is very much cheaper than in England). If I had to do this over again, I would park on the Spain side of the border and take some picture of the rock and then go home. Consider yourself warned if you happen to be in the area.

After a long drive home from the coast, we ended the night with a nice dinner of quail and partridge – both local delicacies.

Product endorsement section: We normally pickup maps for the cities that we will travel to before we leave home and we have found the National Geographic street maps to be the best. The main reason is that they come laminated in plastic which not only protects it in the rain but allows it to be unfolded and folded again in seconds. The normal paper maps are a real pain especially when in a busy metro station trying to get your bearings.

In addition to the few bottles of Spanish wine that we will be bringing home, we also have a few jars of Nutella packed away in our luggage which we picked up at the grocery store. Now many of you will be asking: “Baden, what’s with the Nutella? You can buy this in Vancouver”. Technically this is true but on our trip to Germany two years ago, our friend Frank disclosed to us what may be the greatest scientific mystery of our time: European Nutella is different than Nutella in North America. I can’t explain the logic behind this but we have found that the European version to be more to our liking and always make a point of bringing several jars home with us. So far we have not had to explain this to Canada Customs officials.

Our time in Spain is quickly coming to an end. Our stay at the house in Ronda will be over on Friday morning and we will be heading back to Madrid for our flight back home. The Excellent Spanish Adventure has been different that any other vacation and we will remember it for many years. As is our custom to wrap up this final email, here are the hits and misses of our Excellent Spanish Adventure:

Hits:

-Excellent Spanish Vino Tinto (red wine). And so inexpensive!

-Low Prices. This has been the most inexpensive country we have visited in Europe so far and by quite a large margin. If you weren’t eating in restaurants but buying groceries every day, it would be very cheap to live here. I can see why so many British come here for vacation as it would be a *huge* bargain for them.

-Flamenco. This one night exceeded my expectations on every level and will be one of the main things that I remember from Spain.

-Football. I will never be able to experience another sports event in Canada like seeing Réal Madrid in Bernebau stadium.

-Chocolate Con Churros. This delicious breakfast combination was the perfect local experience to start our days in Madrid. Sadly, we have not seen this anywhere in Ronda.

-Los Garibitos. The perfect ending to our trip was to unwind in this idyllic Spanish countryside house.

Misses:

-Language. This is actually not what it seems. We actually would have gotten much more out of our trip to Spain had we spent a bit more time learning some Spanish. The people couldn’t have been friendlier trying to accommodate us on this point.

-History Overload. After about the second week, we both just couldn’t see another castle or cathedral. This is not really a negative but is something to consider for anyone planning on seeing Europe. Spending some time just doing *nothing* is sometimes the best thing you can be doing. And it’s *so* Spanish.

-Smoking. This one makes it to every one of my summaries about anywhere is Europe. Be prepared to have smoke everywhere – from the minute you step off the plane.

Until next year.

Adios!

Barb and Baden.

Photos from our Excellent Spanish Adventure trip can be seen here