Oh my goodness- It is already Saturday night!

This week passed so quickly it will be hard to recap everything! Since I wrote on Tuesday we visited Alicante briefly, took off by car with Caitie to see Granada, then took the train to Barcelona and toured it quickly in order to leave tomorrow. It was fast. Let me recap.

Monday we arrived in Alicante by train after traveling most of the day. We had dinner with the girls and went to bed for an uncomfortably hot night in Alicante. During our entire stay we had hot, sunny humid days. This warm weather is attractive to many, including our warm and tanned daughter. Mike and I, on the other hand, moved to Seattle because we don't enjoy hot weather, particularly humid weather. So, with our air conditioning difficulties we suffered in the heat. On
Tuesday morning Caitie and Catherine joined us for breakfast. Caitie wanted to take advantage of visiting parents to fulfill her cravings, so we went in search of eggs. Egg breakfasts are very difficult to find in Spain. We enjoyed two mornings with bacon (sort of like ours) and eggs when we were in Avila, but that is the only exception to our normal ham on hard white rolls. So, with Caitie leading the way we walked the promenade searching for eggs; futilely it turns out. We settled for toast and coffee and came back to our hotel for eggs.

After breakfast we traipsed out, by public city bus, to the mall where we shopped for school clothes for Caitie. Spanish malls are enclosed multistory modern malls like you can find in any suburban location in the US. Anchor department stores like H&M flank the ends of the mall with smaller trendy stores in the center. A top floor food court served up a reasonable Ensalada Mixta, another of our staples. These Spanish salads are usually a standard mix of lettuce, tomato, canned tuna and sometimes some extras like canned corn, olives and hard boiled egg. Olive oil and wine vinegar on the side for dressing. Caitie came away with only a few new things, while Deanne played assistant shopper and Mike paced the halls of the mall for exercise. After another bus ride we ended up at Caitie's apartment where Mom and Dad got to see the wonderful home Caitie and Catherine have made for themselves so far from "home". Caitie had a few errands to do, like hanging the laundry out to dry. Their apartment, like most of Spain, has a washer but no clothes drier. In her case, the clothes line hangs out over an internal courtyard. After she packed for our trip we walked the mile or so from her apartment to the beach where our hotel sits. After resting up a bit and letting some time go by (you can't arrive at a restaurant before 9:30 if you expect to eat) we wandered through the port across the street from the hotel in search of a restaurant. Using our age-old test of only selecting a place that looks full of locals, and avoiding the touristy places like the neon lit "Coyote Ugly", we sat down at an outdoor cafe in which the waiters yelled our orders into a window about the size of a MacDonald's window in which the orders and food both moved. We all enjoyed our dinner; Mike finding small, tapa sized sandwiches called BAPs made up of (what else) ham and cheese. Caitie and I shared a wonderful grilled vegetable platter with thin slices of eggplant, zucchini, carrots, mushrooms, onions and endive all grilled and dressed with olive oil. I now know how to order a glass of wine, so imagine my surprise when I did so and was served chilled red wine. I have no idea why it was chilled, but this was the first of two times in which it happened, so I think if you order by the glass you sometimes get the benefit of the overnight storage in the fridge.

By the time we returned to our room after dinner it was midnight and the air conditioner and the cooler (but not cool) night air had not done anything to make our room more pleasant. Two calls to the front desk had failed to bring a bed for
Caitie, but a quick call by her in Spanish to the housekeeper remedied that problem in five minutes. Nothing remedied the stuffiness of the room. The three of us spent a restless, warm night. Caitie coughed all night and nursed a burned finger she got while trying to make tea in our room with a new water heating coil.

By 9:00 on Wednesday morning Mike and I were back at the train station to pick up a rental car at Avis. In our VW Golf we drove back to the hotel, picked up Caitie and hit the road. We had decided to visit Granada and the Alhambra because: 1) none of us had ever been there, 2) it is about four hours away by car which is easy to do in the time we had allocated and 3) everywhere else we could go in the equivalent time didn't appeal. The drive to Granada was beautiful - like driving in California without all of the people or houses. The Southern Mediterranean are of Spain has a climate very similar to California and the hilly area reminded both Mike and me of the Inland Empire and San Gabriel Valley minus all of the development. The area was humid and had a haze that could easily be mistaken for smog but was probably not, since there is not much smog producing industry or cars.

Spain has beautiful roads, and unlike Portugal they were all toll-free. Two lanes in each direction was adequate to keep traffic moving quickly in all but a few areas where we experienced some congestion from slow trucks, cars and construction all coming together at the same time.

I had a mapquest generated set of directions to our 1 star hotel in the old town section of Granada which specified directions in minute detail, providing exactly what we needed to wind our way through the little one way streets. We arrived at the hotel, unloaded our bags and traipsed in only to find the first failure to our successful use of the internet for booking hotels. Apparently booking.com had not e-mailed them of the reservation I made the previous night, so there was no room available for us. The desk clerk called around and secured us a room nearby at the same rate of only 53 Euros per night for three of us, so we reversed the unpacking and moved a half mile away. For 53 euros we got a GREAT air conditoner that worked perfectly, a double bed and single bed with a tiny strip of floor between them and a servicable bathroom. We even got free internet, although we didn't figure that out until the second night. The bonus, though, is that we also got ants. Lots and lots of little black ants.

We wandered around Granada, especially enjoying the Albaicín area where we had dinner our first night. This UNESCO recognized historical city maintains its Moorish roots through small, narrow streets with open shops selling turkish good and teas. We had a delicious Morroccan meal served by a man that speaks multiple languages and welcomes every guest in their native language. It was fun.

I am off to bed. We are supposed to have internet tomorrow so I will continue then.