Bedrock

With Maureen called away to America to go see her dad (who is not at all well)… and having already booked tickets for the Alhambra Palace, rather than sit around, Jonathan, Suzanne and I on Friday took the long drive down to Granada. Most of the way the weather was warm at around 25c or so and our first stop was a brief trip to Carrefour (well, you can’t go to Granada without at least calling in).  We then went off in search of Alhambra.

You would think in this day and age it would be a simple matter of plugging the name into the Sat Nav – but no, TomTom wanted us to go the wrong way up nearly every one-way backstreet in the city so we soon gave up and started to follow the street signs. Just as these were getting us no-where, a complete stranger on a motorbike knocked on the window.. “Alhambra?” he said?  We nodded – and off we went.

A couple of times we took a wrong turn or had doubts about some amazingly narrow street – he patiently waited and on one occasion backtracked to help us out.  Of course none of this was out of generosity – he wanted paying for the service – but compared to driving around Granada for hours getting lost, we figured this was a decent trade-off.

At this point things started to go REALLY wrong as Maureen had booked the tickets on an online service and I recall she’d had difficulty getting the final payment page. When the attendant at Alhambra Palace could find no trace of Scargill in the computer, we knew we’d had that. A big sign said “FULL” and indeed no tickets were available.

Not ones to give up we popped over to a cafe I know from old across the street and had a nice lunch in the shade before hopping on the tour bus for a nice long tour of the city. GREAT idea. Some day I’ll bother to look up Alhambra because it’s used for everything from the name of the Palace to my favourite beer when I’m over there. The sign on the right is advertising the latter.

Apart from one episode sitting waiting for the bus to move, on the open-top top floor at 40 degrees which wasn’t a lot of fun, the whole trip was excellent and gave us a good view of the city. I recommend this to anyone on their first trip. I’ve been to Granada several times partly because the best hardware store I’ve been able to find “Brico Depot” is there and is, handily near Carrefour and a load of other large stores but the bus tour with audio gave insights to the city that you’d never get in a million years by driving around in the car.

Very nice – a shame Maureen could not be with us.

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