Wednesday, April 14
Making it to a city early in the morning by train has its perks and its drawbacks. On the one hand, you’re up and ready to go, on the other hand, you’re exhausted because it’s very difficult to have a full night’s rest on a night train. We stumbled onto the train platform with our bags pretty groggy eyed and made our way to a café for breakfast and COFFEE. After breakfast, we hung out at the train station, researching how to get to Gibraltar and Morocco. We saw that trains were leaving from Granada and figured we could go down to Gibraltar for the day, hop a boat to Morocco (since it’s practically across the street) then come back to Gibraltar and spend the night, then come back up to Granada the next day. Turns out Gibraltar is pretty far from Granada, about a 5 hour journey by bus AND train. There is no direct train line to Gibraltar, you have to take a train to a station within Spain then take a bus the rest of the way to Gibraltar. Looks like that dream won’t be happenin’ folks! We then made it our mission to find a place to stay for the night in Granada. We found some places but were not able to book them, but we did have addresses, so we hopped in a taxi from the train station and went to the first hostel on our list. We got there and the hostel was a hostel no longer. Turns out the hostel had moved. Awesome. We then hiked down to a little park we had passed in our taxi. We left our moms and our bags at a little café and went in search of the Granada Tourism office.
Turns out the tourism office knows a lot! They handed us maps, info sheets with names, prices, locations and ratings for all of the hotels and hostels in the area. We hiked back up to our moms to discuss and research. (THIS IS WHY iPHONES ARE AWESOME). We checked a couple on Trip Advisor and eventually found Hotel Anacapri. We read in one of the reviews that if you say the magic words “We found you in our Rick Steves book” they’ll give you a great discount. It worked! We had some pages from one of Rick Steves’ books left with us. We had sent the bulk of his giant “bible” home and ripped out the pages we needed for our trip back in February. We called up the hotel, said the magic words, and they said to come on down. We walked there from the park, made a reservation then went up to our room for four. We joked that we were getting the penthouse as we were riding up in the elevator. Turns out, it was true! Once we got to the last floor in the elevator, we had to take some stairs up to the very top floor - our room. It was a great little 4 bed room with a sitting area and everything. After dropping our things off, it was time for a nap! So we napped for about an hour then went out to get some lunch and meet Granada. Why, hello, Granada. We’re the Woodmere Gang. Pleasure to meetcha.
After the bus ride, we hopped off where we started at the Cathedral and did some shoppin’ (always fun with the mommies!) After our shoppin’ we decided to do like the Spanish do and take a siesta! We headed back to the hostel, made a reservation for a Flamenco show, then took a nap. We woke up, showered, got dressed then headed downstairs to meet the person picking us up. Turns out it was also a walking tour! We hopped on our bus and were dropped off in what was formerly the Muslim area of Granada. What makes Granada so interesting is that it went back and forth between the Moors and the Christians for hundreds of years so you have a ton of Muslim, Gypsy, and Christian influences all around the city. We eventually made it to a great lookout point where we could see La Ahambra lit up in the distance. It was pretty cool.
We then went up to the restaurant where the Flamenco dance party was held. It’s located in what was formerly a cave inhabited by Gypsies. We ordered our dinner and sangria and watched in awe as these 4 dancers and 3 musicians took the stage. Although the main volume for the music was up probably a little too high, it was spectacular to hear and watch. The musicians and dancers are constantly moving. If they aren’t clapping, they’re tapping with their feet. It’s elegant and powerful all at the same time and quite a workout! We’ll try to upload a video soon.
After the Flamenco dance party, it was about 12:30am so we headed back to our hotel. We tried researching hostels in Gibralatr again and just couldn’t find anything so then we started to look up places on the coast of Spain like Malaga. We asked the woman at reception if she liked Malaga. She said it was cool, but that Nerja was cooler and had lots of cool caves to check out. Sounds cool! We looked up hostels in Nerja (pronounced “Ner-ha“), found one 3 blocks from the beach, booked it then went to sleep.
XOXO J&K&M&R
No comments:
Post a Comment