We woke up to the sound of a seagull imitating a cat. I didn't even know they could do that. I rather wish they couldn't.
We had planned to go to Tangier, but we decided not to. We couldn't find out when the hydrofoil was running and the next day was a Sunday and probably a holiday in Catholic Spain.
Mom seemed to have a cold or something, but was ambulatory, so we decided to take the #3 bus to Europa Point. We went to the bus stop and waited. We waited for the better part of a half hour and no bus came by, so we walked up to the botanic gardens. The gardens were very nice, but in the middle of some sort of renovation. We were able to wander around, but some sections were closed off, including an area that appeared to be a small zoo. At one place, amongst the vegetation, was an old British phone booth, with no phone in it.
We worked our way generally upward, and when we had reached the casino, I got the idea of walking to Europa Point, thinking it would be mostly level from there. I didn't mention this idea out loud or anything, and we'd gone a fair distance before Mom figured it out. I was wrong about the level part, though. It was up and down the whole way out. When we were almost there, we saw the #3 bus go by in the other direction, so we figured we'd be able to ride back.
Europa point's most notable features -- almost its only features -- are the Ibrahim-Al-Ibrahim Mosque and the lighthouse. We could see Africa (barely) across the strait.
The mosque was a gift from King Fahud of Saudi Arabia and has only been there since 1997. It makes Europa Point much more attractive than it would otherwise be.
There's also a cheesy tourist shop called "The Last Shop in Europe". This isn't the southernmost point of Europe, but it sounds good. The sign also says "Much Cheapness!"
At Much Cheapness, we bought some random souvenirs and got some potato chips and Coke. Of course, they're not called "potato chips". They're called "crisps", because "chips" are french fries, which aren't called french fries anywhere outside of the US. These were Walker's Crisps and were much better than standard American chips. I got Salt & Vinegar, which sounds disgusting, but wasn't.
As we were leaving, another person in the shop told us of a coastal route back to town, through the tunnel that we weren't supposed to go through. So we walked through it, toward Rosia Bay. The tunnel was one lane, with bare rock walls and water dripping from the ceiling. On the other side was a waterfall, coming straight out of the rock about 100 feet up.
Rosia Bay has a public pool, snack bar, wading pool, and a couple dozen strange protuberances that we couldn't figure out. Everything was closed and had been for a while. It's probably only open in the summer. There were a few people, like us, wandering around, and one or two people fishing. The road was closed at this point due to a rock slide. We took advantage of this to get some pieces of the Rock of Gibraltar.
We went around the rock slide and through the tunnel on the other side. This took us to the entrance to Parson's Lodge. Parson's Lodge isn't one. It's a military battery built in the 18th Century to defend the bay. No one's completely sure why it was called Parson's Lodge. But you can go into it, so we did.
At the entrance was an office with what looked like about a five-foot-high ceiling. The proprietor, or whatever you would call someone who collects money from tourists to visit a military battery, was out front talking to someone, accompanied by a cat with the top of one of his ears missing, which the proprietor told us meant that he was neutered. It sounded to me like they'd clipped the wrong end, but it wasn't my worry.
He also told us that the waterfall was runoff from the water purification facility, and was a lot less picturesque close-up.
We gave the proprietor £2 and he gave us a badly photocopied map and description. He started to give us a flashlight, but discovered it didn't work. But that was okay. He said we could catch up with the people ahead of us and use theirs. We wondered why we would need a flashlight. It seems there was a tunnel with a ladder that goes down to a lookout area and cannon placement. Mom wasn't too thrilled about that, but we got to the tunnel just as two women were going down ahead of us and they talked her into it. They were teachers for the Ministry of Defense, who had just come back from Christmas in the UK. They kept marvelling at the fact that they could actually wander around this place unsupervised: "You have so much freedom here! In the UK you can't do anything."
By the time we finally got back to town, it was almost 4:00 and we hadn't had lunch, so we got some more Walker's Crisps and some Burger King food and sat outside at Casemate's Square. While we were there, Robert the Rock Guide walked by with his family and said hello. I asked him if there was anything special that went on for New Year's Eve, but he didn't know of anything. He said that Casemate's Square would be as likely a place as any.
We puttered around for a few hours, then went out looking for food. There wasn't much open for dinner, but Maharaja was open, so we ate there again. At 8:00 we were the only people there. For dinner music they were playing a tape of popular songs played on the sitar, including such sitar favorites as "Tequila," "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Edelweis." The tape had been recorded from an LP, which skipped. They were nice to us, even though we hadn't tipped them, so we didn't tip them again.
When I made plans to go to Gibraltar, a year earlier, I had tried to find out what they did on New Year's Eve. I sent email to the tourism department asking about it, and awhile later I got a nice brochure on Gibraltar, but no answer about New Year's Eve. So what do they do? As it turns out, not much. They drink a lot, but there's nothing especially novel in that.
We went out at 11:00 to see if we could see anything going on. We thought maybe there would be some fireworks at the harbor or something. We saw a group of people walking purposefully, so we followed them. We went down Main Street, through Casemates Square, and out the gate toward the harbor, until we realized that they were just going for pizza. There was hardly anyone else around, so we headed back the way we came. Apart from a few pubs, there was almost no activity at all. So we went back to the room.
We went out again at 11:45. This time there were a few more people. Not a lot, but small clumps wandering here and there. We went back toward Casemates Square. There were 50 or 60 people standing around in small groups -- families, tourists, children on scooters -- but they weren't doing anything. There was a party in one of the apartments on top of the wall, so we could hear music, and every now and then a flare would go up. Not fireworks, mind you, just a flare.
Right at midnight, some fireworks started going up from random locations, and people started making a little more noise. I tried to light my sparklers, but the matches kept blowing out. After a few minutes, we walked back to the hotel. We lit some sparklers on the back porch (sheltered from the wind), then went to bed. Thus began the 21st Century.
The lady at the tourist office had told us that, although the cable car would normally be closed on New Year's Day, there was a cruise ship arriving in the morning, and it was possible that the cable car would open up for them. Once running, they wouldn't likely turn down a paying customer. Well, they did. The ship arrived, the cable car started taking them up the Rock, and we tried to go, too. No way. You had to prove you were with the ship. They certainly weren't about to accept money from people at no extra effort to themselves! So I didn't get to ride the cable car, and we didn't get to see the monkeys again.
We spent the morning wandering Main Street and Line Wall Road, then got lunch at a restaurant on Main -- one of the few that was open. They had a limited holiday menu. Both of us completely forgot to pay and the waiter came running out after us. This isn't too surprising, since everywhere we went in Europe, we had to start getting ready to leave before they would bring us the bill. You can sit there for hours and they won't bring you the bill on their own initiative. Between that and the tipping issue, it's obvious that there's some kind of system that we weren't grasping.
In the afternoon, we stopped in a tiny grocery store for some more Walker's Crisps and Coke. Since it was our last day in Gibraltar, I hadn't changed any more money, and I only had £1.37 left. The bill was £1.60, so I gave him the £1.37 and he charged me 50Pts more to make up the 23p difference. I only had a 100Pts coin, so I gave him that and he gave me 10p in change. I checked the exchange rate afterwards and all this came out nearly exactly right.
We sat in Casemates Square and ate our chips while I tried unsuccessfully to take pictures of seagulls in flight. We wandered through Landport Gate to see what was there, then back to the room to pack.
In the evening, we tried to go out to eat, but every place we looked was closed. There were pubs open, mostly full of people still there from the night before (seriously). We went in one that had a regular menu, but the girl at the counter told me, "We're not doing food, love", so we got more groceries and ate in the room.
It rained during the night, but had cleared up by morning. We had a quick breakfast, got a taxi to the border, and went through customs. It was a little more thorough leaving Gibraltar than entering it. The Spanish border guard didn't care much about our passports, but he wanted to know what we were carrying out. I had some bottles of wine from Seborga - those were okay, but he checked to make sure they weren't whiskey from Gibraltar. He also made sure we weren't taking out any tobacco or electronics products. I'm not sure what the point was, since we weren't Spanish citizens subject to the VAT, and we obviously didn't have enough of anything to be selling it on the black market.
We walked to bus station. I started heading off in the wrong direction and couldn't find the station, so I asked some passersby where it was. I asked a complete sentence in Spanish ("Donde está la estación de autobuses?") and actually understood the answer. I was very pleased with myself.
We took the bus to Algeciras, then dragged our luggage several blocks to the Avis office to pick up the rental car.
By then it was about time for lunch, but we couldn't find a place to park at the local McDonald's, so we drove up the highway until we found another. It didn't open until noon. Since that was another half hour, we decided to drive on a bit. But I couldn't get the car into reverse. The pattern was on the knob, but I couldn't get the gearshift to go where it was showing. I tried other places where reverse might be. Nothing. I tried lifting up on the knob, pressing down on the knob, and jiggling it. Still nothing. After about 15 minutes, I managed to pop it into gear, and then out again. I spent another two or three minutes figuring out what I'd done. The gearshift had a release under the knob, though it was made to look like a single piece, and you had to squeeze it while you were shifting. By that time it was almost noon, so we went back in to McDonald's.
This McDonald's, oddly, was decorated with images of Gibraltar, and from the British perspective. On all the walls were designs of 18th-Century British soldiers and scenes of the Rock. This was more than passing strange, given Spain's ongoing resentment to Britain's presence in Gibraltar (now going on 300 years).
McDonald's was having a promotion based on the game of Monopoly. It was the standard collect-game-pieces-in-a-futile-attempt-to-win-a-big-prize things, but they had some lower-level prizes, including a Monopoly game. Since this was Spain, the game was in Spanish. We decided we needed to win this game. I got an instant winner ticket for a small order of fries, so that seemed like a good start.
We drove up into the mountains to Ronda. It was a winding road, but wide and modern, so we got there by mid-afternoon. We entered through the old city walls and drove through ancient narrow streets across the "new" (18th Century) bridge to a slightly more modern part of town. We parked in the first parking garage we could find and looked for lodging.
We got a room in the Hotel la Española, just past the oldest bullring in Spain. The room was tiny, but nice, and included free parking in the city lot next to the bullring. So we got the car out of the garage and drove to the lot, only to told by the surly attendant that the lot was full. So we went to another garage and dragged our luggage back to the hotel.
It was still fairly early, so we went out wandering around. There are three bridges over gorges, and the most impressive one is the New Bridge. It's the highest, most ornate, and most tourist-infested. There's a photo-op from every angle. We walked across, and without really having any idea where we were going, headed down a side-street that looked interesting. Soon we came across something billed as a "Moorish Mine". It wasn't really a mine at all, but a Moorish palace from the 13th Century. Beneath the palace was a tunnel cut into the rock that went down to the river. It's not really clear what it was used for, so they call it a mine, even though that's the one thing it pretty clearly wasn't.
So we went down. It's a long way to the river, and Ronda is at about 5000 feet, so it was a pretty strenuous climb. Mom was breathing well enough to complain bitterly the whole time. We went all the way down to the river, took some pictures, and trudged back up. There were some gardens at the top, and a view of one of the other bridges.
That evening we walked along the paseo. As far as Spain was concerned it was still Christmas, so people were out shopping, and children were riding on scooters, and a PA system was playing a medley of Christmas songs with a salsa rhythm.
Ronda could have filled up one or two more days, but we wanted to get to Sevilla, so off we went.
Andalusia looks like California. The landscape, the vegetation, the roads, and even the road signs are very similar, if not identical. Sometimes you're driving through northern California (mountains and pine trees) and sometimes southern California (rolling hills and orange groves) but there's never anything that seems especially foreign. Except the castles. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a castle. Many of them are small and unimpressive, and many are in ruins, but they're appropriately ancient and served as a proof that the airlines didn't just trick us and drop us off in Barstow or Pacoima.
The drive to Sevilla was quite pleasant until we got there. You can't drive in Sevilla. At least, you can't drive in the direction you want to, and once you get to where you don't want to go, you can't park there. After about a half hour of driving around, we managed to find the tourist office, but it was closed for the day (at 3:30), and another half hour or more of driving around didn't get us any closer to finding a place to park and call some hotels. Or park at a hotel. Or anything. We found a McDonald's, but couldn't park there, and eventually the road we were on took us, very much against our will, out of Sevilla completely. I managed to find another McDonald's -- this one with a parking lot -- and we stopped and ate and called some hotels. They were all full. So we gave up and drove to Granada.
Granada isn't especially close, but we got there by about 7:00 and did the same thing we did in Sevilla. There was some sort of Christmas-time festival that week, so traffic was even worse that usual, but we were eventuallly able to find a parking garage. Once parked, we could walk around looking for a room. We got one that was expensive but convenient, then went to McDonald's again.
Everyone smokes in Spain. Everyone. The McDonald's, though huge, was thick with cigarette smoke. I've been in casinos that weren't as smoky as that McDonald's. While I was waiting for my order, a girl was holding a cigarette over my tray as she talked to her friend. The ash quivered threateningly, but managed not to fall on my fries.
We still didn't win the Monopoly game, but I won a Coca-Cola hat and an apple pie.
The tourist office was only two blocks from the hotel, so we went there to get a map and directions to the Alhambra.
The Alhambra lives up to the hype. It was built in the 13th Century, when the Moors' Iberian empire still amounted to something, and it managed to withstand the Spanish forces until 1492, longer than anyplace else in Iberia. The Spanish didn't mangle it too badly -- they built a fairly unimpressive palace in the middle of it, but not much else -- so it's survived mostly intact, or at least more intact than most places they conquered. Now there's an EU flag flying over the main tower, which puts a new spin on things. Or maybe, considering Europe's history, just the same old spin.
The place is stunning, and I took more pictures there than any other place we visited, many of them close-ups of the incredible detail the Moors put in everything they built.
After a few hours, we took a break in the courtyard and got some potato chips and Coke, and watched a small white dog do his rounds: begging food off people, playing with other dogs, chasing birds, and doing other vital and urgent dog things. He didn't seem to belong to anyone, but was the star attraction of the courtyard. He was The Little Dog of the Alhambra.
We spent five hours at the Alhambra, which is about the minimum needed for a good overview. That afternoon we took the bus to the Albaicín, where we rambled around for a while before walking back into town. The Albaicín is Old Granada -- much older than the Alhambra -- and traditional home to Gypsies, Moors, and Jews. Far from being a Reconstructed Village For The Tourists, people still live there, and the Moorish influence is still very much alive.
After a day of walking all over the Alhambra and Albaicín, Mom went back the hotel room to relax in the bathtub. I went out to look around the city and see if I could find an Internet cafe. I wandered more than I'd planned, because Granada, like most of Spain, has very few street signs. It's just one of those innovations that didn't really occur to them until recently, and the few they have put up are small signs about twenty feet up the sides of buildings. And since the roads of ancient cities don't even begin to approximate a grid, it's very easy to get lost, even on foot.
So I got lost. Not really lost, since I always had a pretty good idea of how to get back to the hotel, but I kept ending up where I didn't expect to be, then found my way to some other unexpected place by way of a route I hadn't anticipated. I eventually stumbled across Granada Central, which was a small (and smoky) Internet café (Internet den would be a more appropriate term) in an alley. The computers were perched precariously on wooden shelves and I sat on a stool that wasn't really high enough to reach comfortably. The keyboard was on a separate homemade shelf at about a 45-degree angle. It was cheap, though, so I stayed awhile.
I walked around the city for a while, looking at things. There was a group of wastoids at the Plaza del something-or-other, smoking pot and playing the guitar and singing and jumping around. They were seriously baked. There was a little dog with them, but it wasn't The Little Dog of the Alhambra.
My five years of Spanish in high school and college were enough to communicate, but only in the most rudimentary way. Not only had I never really used it much, but I was in a country where everyone lisps. That's Castellano, or as the Spanish would say, "Cathtellano". I tried to mimic this, but I just sounded more like Sylvester the Cat, so I went back to my Southern California high school accent.
But I was still trying to be a Cathtellano when we went to the post office to buy some stamps and a box. These were handled by different clerks at different windows, so after getting the stamps, I asked, in my best Sylvester accent, "Donde ethtá la ventilla para comprar lath cajath?", which I think means, "Where is the little window for to sell the boxes?" I think this made her day.
We left Granada and headed for Guadix. Guadix wasn't really in the plan, but it was on the way, and it had people living in cave-houses, so we stopped there. The Barrio Troglodyte (no, I'm not making that up) is a jagged, rocky area into which people have tunneled. The resulting houses aren't much to look at from the outside, but rather nice inside, judging from the museum. Chimneys poke out of the rocks, and many of the houses have more conventional fronts on them. My guidebook said that all this was because of the poverty of the area, but it didn't really seem all that poor. It probably has more to do with tradition, lack of local building materials, and an expedient method of insulation.
Outside of Guadix I stopped for gas for the first time. The price is listed as 130.9, but of course that's pesetas per liter, which comes to about $3 a gallon. It cost me nearly $40 to fill the tank.
Then we went to Gergal. We didn't mean to, but the highway seemed to end there and there was a detour that headed up into the hills. We decided that had to be wrong and headed back to Gergal to look for another route. We didn't find one, although we drove around Gergal, through some streets that were barely wide enough for the car. Then we went back to the detour and up in the hills. Before too long, we came to the ruins of a building that had the names of towns and distances on it, including the distance to Tabernas, which was where we were trying to go. This was obviously the old road, before the highway was put in. Or, to be more accurate, before the highway will be put in, because it wasn't there yet, even though the map said it was.
The detour turned out to be right, and we found Tabernas without any trouble. The Tabernas area looks less like California than the rest of southern Spain, and more like Arizona. Which is why hundreds of spaghetti westerns were filmed there by Sergio Leone and others. To capitalize on this notoriety, there are two small theme parks, within a couple of miles of each other, that are designed to look like the American West: Mini-Hollywood and Texas Hollywood. We figured one would be enough and we stopped at Mini-Hollywood.
Mini-Hollywood looks like Old Tucson or Knott's Berry Farm, at least at first glance. The main area was a small Western town, with souvenir shops, snack bars, horse rides, a film museum, a "cementery", a "Red Indian reservation", and a genuine Old West pizzeria. There was also an Adventist church called St. Michael's, next to which was one of those carnival games where you're supposed to swing a hammer hard enough to ring the bell at the top. There was a zoo behind the Western town, but we didn't go see that.
The main restaurant had a lunch buffet, so we ate there. They served such authentic Western cuisine as paella, lasagna (with refried beans), and rice pudding.
We left around 4:00. We were only planning to go to Altea, on the coast, so we had plenty of time to get there. Leaving Mini-Hollywood, we went past Texas Hollywood, through the Arizona desert, and rounded a bend, where we saw....a castle. It was Spain after all.
The air had been fairly hazy around Granada, but had cleared up. As we entered Múrcia, it started to get hazy again. After a while, we started to see why: People were burning things. Every few miles, there would be a bonfire. It looked and smelled like wood, mostly, although one smelled strongly of fish. This was in a farming area, so the fires seemed to be how they got rid of cuttings or any other burnable trash. The result was, basically, smog. And it went up the coast of Spain at least to Barcelona.
On the way through Múrcia we drove through a tunnel. There's nothing really unusual about that -- we drove through a lot of tunnels on this trip -- but this tunnel was through a hill with a castle on top. A really big castle. It would probably have been worth seeing, if we'd had time. Instead, we drove under it.
We had made a reservation at the Hotel de Cap Negret in Altea, because that was the first place I called in the listing I got in Granada. We had no idea where it was, but as we drove into Altea, there it was on the left: big, accessible, and with plenty of free parking. That was the only time that happened on the trip. It turned out to be a resort type of place, right on the Mediterranean - the type of place that caters to tour buses full of old people that come to play bingo. It was very nice, though, in that slightly run-down but kind of classy way that beach hotels often have. We checked in and drove into town to look for food.
We saw a sign for McDonald's, with some cryptic wording on it, but three or four miles down the road we still hadn't seen it, so we turned around and headed back to check some side streets. We drove all over Altea, which was a small town with (of course) very narrow streets. I finally decided to go out the way we'd gone before, only a little further. And there it was. The cryptic wording turned out to be the Catalán name of the town next to Altea. We failed to win the Monopoly game again.
At the hotel, we watched part of Homeward Bound in Italian. It wasn't nearly as irritating as the English version.
Photos of Guadix and Mini-Hollywood
In the morning I called the Hotel Xalet Sasplugas in Andorra la Vella and made a reservation. I tried to ask if we would need chains to drive to Andorra, but the communication, in broken English and broken Spanish, was barely good enough to get the room reserved. I tried calling a tourist information center in Barcelona, but there was no answer. It was not only Saturday, but also Epiphany, a holiday in Spain. So we decided to chance it without chains.
We drove up the coast toward Barcelona, watching the day's fires spread smoke across the morning sky. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that spanned the highway, like the Glass House Restaurant on the Oklahoma Turnpike. They had every convenience except an ATM, which would have been helpful, since I was running low on pesetas. I spent another $40 on gas and we moved on.
Spain has some very nice highways, and they're paid for with tolls. They don't just have toll booths and entry or exit points, or for obviously more expensive sections like bridges. They have tolls every few miles, with no discernible pattern. Sometimes you pay a flat rate in advance, and sometime you take a ticket and pay a few miles later, based on some mysterious algorithm that I couldn't figure out. I used up all my Spanish money and we went to credit cards. They take the card and run it through a machine and give you a receipt. You don't even have to sign anything. It's a very efficient way to implement a convoluted system.
Spanish drivers are efficient, too, in their own way. They have two speeds: slow and fast. Slow is about 45 mph. Fast is about 85. There is no in-between. If you are in the fast lane and you are not doing at least 85, you will soon have another car approximately three millimeters from your rear bumper, waiting for you to move over. They don't usually honk or flash their lights or display impatience in any way other than gluing themselves to the back of your car. In the slow lane, you will find yourself behind a small Citroën dump truck with scraps of wood in the back. This system can be annoying, but no one ever passes on the right, and in general, Spanish drivers were much more predictable than American drivers, at least on the highway.
We stopped at Santa Bàrbara, which wasn't easy. It looked like it should be just off the highway, but we had to pay a toll first, then loop back south on an older highway, take an exit to another town, which took us north again to a traffic circle with the first sign that mentioned Santa Bàrbara. Then we crossed the main highway and drove for a couple of miles until we reached...a detour. The detour took us down dirt roads through orchards and past fertilizer processing plants until we reached the road we'd turned off of in the first place, on the other side of a washed-out bridge. Then we drove about a mile to Santa Bàrbara.
Which was ugly. We'd been in several dumpy little towns, but they were dumpy in quaint, picturesque, or historic ways. Santa Bàrbara was just an ugly little town. So we took some pictures and left.
There's a rat's nest of highways around Barcelona, and they change names in unclear ways. We thought we were getting on the highway to Andorra and managed to get on one heading in some other direction. So we got off the highway, went under it, and tried to get back on. But there was no on-ramp. There were signs indicating the on-ramp was ahead, but we didn't find it. Instead, the road passed under the highway and ran parallel to it on the other side. Then it curved north along the highway we'd wanted in the first place. Then it passed through a town. Then it passed through another town. Then we had to stop and wait for a herd of sheep to cross the road. Then we turned right and went under the highway into another town, or possibly the same town, then went left to parallel the highway on the other side. After about ten miles, we managed to get onto the highway and headed to Andorra.
The landscape changed from Southern California to Northern California as we went into the mountains. We never went very high, though. Andorra la Vella is only about 2500 feet, or half as high as Ronda, so chains were never an issue. The roads were fairly winding, but in good condition, so we could go at a reasonable speed. Or at least we would have if we weren't constantly stuck behind some pokey person riding his brakes uphill.
As we got closer, we went through the longest tunnel of the trip - over three miles. Naturally, there was a toll.
Getting into Andorra was easy. The border check was like Gibraltar: look at the passports from a distance, but don't actually open them. Finding our way to Andorra la Vella was easy, too: there's only one main road into town. Finding the hotel once we were in town was another matter.
We didn't have a detailed map of Andorra la Vella, so we figured we'd stop somewhere and call. We saw a sign to McDonald's. Simple: we would stop at McDonald's and call. But we couldn't find McDonald's. The sign had an arrow, and we followed the arrow, and we ended up...well, I don't know where we ended up, but it wasn't McDonald's. Or anywhere else, as far as I could tell. We managed to find our way back to the sign and tried another road, but that took us to a dirt road that ended almost immediately. I really don't remember how we found McDonald's, but we made it there somehow. Not that McDonald's is the only place we could have stopped, but it seemed like the best place to get something to eat, use the restrooms, find a phone booth, and ask questions in Pidgin Spanish.
As it turned out, one of the employees spoke some English and could ask someone where Hotel Xalet Sasplugas was, and he drew me a map. It wasn't far, but nothing really is in Andorra, as long as you don't go around in circles. I pulled into the hotel parking garage and promptly ran into a post. It was a big post, too. Being big should make it easier to see, but it probably also makes it harder to miss. Fortunately, I'd signed up for the full Stupid Tourist insurance coverage, so it didn't matter much, except that I couldn't roll my window down anymore, and that made it harder to pay tolls.
We checked into our room, watched a French blooper show, and went to sleep.
Photos of Altea and Santa Bàrbara
