Granada 21st October

October 21^st Granada again.

We spent the day in Granada town again, Jo had very kindly shouted us tickets to revisit the Alhambra as we were keen to have another look at the gardens and the palaces. We had a great time at the gardens a week earlier, and as it was late in the day had them pretty much to ourselves, and it was even more of a treat as the late afternoon sunlight cast a golden glow over the golden stone of the castle/fort and old walls, as well as the garden itself. Today though we had a morning visit which officially started at 8 am but by the time we had woken, eaten breakfast, and made our way into town from la Zubia on the bus and then walked the thirty muntes or so up to The Alhambra and got our real tickets it was not far off 11. Of course by then all the tourists were up and about and so the gardens were incredibly crowded. We had a lovely walk around bits we hadn’t seen before though, and then sat in the sun on some steps (watching the local gardeners smoking cigarettes and sweeping up leaves with old fashioned brooms and dustpans, in a very laborious and slow manner, chatting and dropping ash more quickly than they could sweep up leaves). We read our books for an hour though, thawing slowly (the morning was quite fresh, and in the shade it was not at all “Spanish”. It was then time to head over to the Palaces again and to wait in line for our 1 o’clock viewing.

It was good to see the tiling and stone work in the day-light. I had thought it was all pretty amazing when we saw it lit up at night-time, but to get the real detail, day light is the key. There were unfortunately heaps of people there (of course) and so to get a good view of the complete areas was impossible, but it is still an incredible piece of architecture. I haven’t had a chance to see our photos from then (or the last few days actually) because we are staying for free at places we don’t have power so the computer is running out of steam (only 30 minutes left now) and the camera battery is also very low. We were going to go to McD’s today and try to recharge things but the day got away on us.

Hopefully some of these photos are good though, many from the other night were very blurry because you weren’t allowed flash or tripods and every time I leaned on a wall to try to steady myself (for camera shake, no other reason) a polite Spaniard would ask me not to lean on the fine tiles (of course I was unaware that I was, it was in no way deliberate!!).

After we had spent our time at the palaces it was 2pm and we were all pretty tired and weary of seeing things too, so we headed back down into the town, stopped at a café had coffee/ice cream and a sit down, a quick browse through some Arab quarter shops, an attempt to buy a book in English about morocco (to no avail despite walking half of Granada’s streets to find a recommended book store which was out of the English version!!! And which we had had to wait at a bar drinking beer while we waited for it to re-open post siesta time.

Anyway we caught the bus back to where we had left the campervan (on the street outside our campsite) and drove off towards the airport looking for either a camp ground (there was one about 5kms from the airport) or a park at the airport where we could stay. We ended up about a km from the airport in a monitored car park. We weren’t supposed to sleep in the truck but the lovely Spanish man misunderstood us and said it was OK, and then when he came to check much later I think he thought the hassle of asking us to leave was too great, and we promised to be gone by 6 the next morning, so he decided to let us stay, begging us to be gone early in the morning.

We all had a restless night, I think we were worried we’d sleep in, so it was patchy to say the least, but it only cost 5 euro, a far cry from all the other nights we had been staying at exorbitantly priced and not particularly flash camp-sites.