While we’re on the subject of wine, I must say that the ubiquity of high quality wine at bargain-basement prices here has been one of the highlights of the trip. The average cost of a bottle of wine we’d get at a restaurant has been around $18-20, and even though we are getting two bottles every day (one lunch, one dinner), almost every single one of them has been quite good. I can’t remember the last time I got a bottle in a restaurant in the US for under $40 which I enjoyed. Some of the inexpensive wines here we’ve gotten in the $15-$25 range have been fantastic, and are things I would have been pleased with had I spent $60 on the exact same bottle at a restaurant at home.
After the sherry tasting, we continued to Cádiz to start our drive along the coast. We didn’t stop there, but just drove through to check out the town and the huge port in the bay. After that, we made a beeline to Vejer de la Frontera, a small hilltop town with very strong Moorish roots in the Andalusian hills near the coast. This town was a delight as there wasn’t much tourism, and was a very local scene. All the whitewashed homes, the winding lanes which were more staircases than roads, and the heavy Moorish influence gave it Greek-island type feel, and it was very relaxing and a nice evening stop. I also had a really nice meal there, a seared duck breast with a red wine and sherry vinegar sauce and a wine-poached pear. I also didn’t get any fries (although there was no starch component at all on my plate, hhhhhmmmn), and while Juls got a big pile of fries with here steak, these were at least the best fries she had yet had.
The next day, we got back into the car and headed back along the coast, stopping briefly in Gibraltar and Marbella. Gibraltar was interesting as it is actually British Territory, not a city, and being part of the British Empire has a very Anglican feel to it, right down to the boxy red telephone booths. We actually had to go through customs to get in and out, although I don’t think the border guards sweated the details. All they did was look at our passports, and when we re-entered Spain the immigration agent only looked at my passport as I flashed it open from 5 feet away. Juls apparently never even got hers out of her bag. Whatever.
We actually didn’t go up to the top of the rock. If was a very cold, rainy, and foggy day, and you could barely see across the bay, let alone across the straight to Africa. We just ended up tooling around the town in a public bus to get a feel for the place. By far the most interesting part, though, was simply entering and exiting the country. Because the country is so small (just 2.5 sq miles, 1/3 of which is dominated by its namesake rock), there’s hardly any place to put a runway. The one and only place with sufficient space for an airplane runway is running parallel right along the border. Actually, that wasn’t even sufficient as they had to extend it out into the bay with reclaimed land. Due to this, you actually have to walk across the airstrip whenever you enter or leave the country. It’s got stop lights and signals like you’ve have a railroad crossing to keep you from crossing the runway then a plane is about to take off or lang. Pretty wacky.After Gibraltar, we continued on along the Costa del Sol to Marbella and then headed inland to our final stop, Granada. The coast here was very beautiful, but I can see why our guidebook didn’t recommend staying along this part of the coast. It’s very developed, and appears to be more a set of resort-y beach towns littered with condos and timeshares for retired Europeans that want a tiny sliver of beach and lots of sun than they are places of historic or cultural interest.
