Surfin’ USA

Andalusia report

After some days back into work I finally get around to write a little about our trip to the south of Spain — of course garnished with some pictures:

On Monday, the 5th of June, we flew to Malaga, where we picked up our rental car, a small silver Peugeot 206 (the weakest Diesel model), and drove around 140 km to Grazalema, one of the famous, picturesque “white” mountain villages in central Andalusia. Contrary to what I had expected, this area is very mountainous, but all the more gorgeous to look at. This also meant, however, that almost all streets were narrow serpentines. Our hotel in Grazalema spontaneously upgraded us to a quite spacious apartment, offering a lovely view of the town from its porch. Starting from there we undertook several exploration tours through the lovely landscape to the surrounding villages.

We also went for a day tour to Gibraltar, the small British rock at the south end of Spain. Among other things this it is known for its monkeys and the tax-free shopping. A quite funny fact is that, since real estate is so limited in Gibraltar, the local airfield’s runway is crossed by the city’s main road — everytime a plane lands or departs the road hast to be shut down.
From Gibraltar you can also peer over to the African continent — unfortunately an actual trip to Africa by ferry would have been too expensive and taken too long, so it had to be postponed for now…

After a couple of days we changed hotels and thereby cities, from the small Grazalema on the mountain side to the bigger Ronda, which is located in the lowlands and one of the local bullfight capitals. The city’s old and new town center are separated by a deep canyon, which you can cross via a historic bridge, offering a breath-taking panorama.

From Ronda we made another day trip to the city of Seville. Apart from exploring the city in general we spent quite some time in the Alcazar, the old Moorish palace and its beautiful gardens. As a sidenote, this was the hottest day of the whole trip, above 35 degrees and very humid.

All in all it was a very nice vacation, with some relaxing time by the hotel pool but also interesting and exciting tours to different places. Naturally the nine days flew by way to quickly, but I guess that’s common to all vacations.

Congratulations Tina and Robert!

Well, meanwhile I’m back in Germany, just in time to watch and celebrate Germany’s late victory against Poland — what a match! Anyway, before I write something about the spain trip I want to catch up on an event taking place before my vacation, June 3rd to be precise: my cousin and, more importanly, close friend Robert married his long-time girlfriend Tina, a very good friend of mine as well.

It was a very nice wedding ceremony and party afterwards, and I was honored to be their best man. Naturally a lot of pictures were taken, for a more extensive coverage visit Robert’s website, where you can also leave your wishes for the newlyweds. From my side I’d like to take the opportunity and once more wish them all the best for their shared future, I’m sure you’ll have a long and happy marriage!

Ah, vacation…

Turns out our second hotel here in Spain has a PC with free Internet access available. So I figured I´d just post a short hello and let everyone know that we are having a great time. The weather is fantastic (lots of sun) and Andalucia, the area we are visiting, is really beautiful. We took a lot of pictures already and I´ll probably post some of them here when I´m back in Germany next week.

But for now I´ll just send vacation greetings to everyone, hope you´re having a good time as well. Oh, by the way, a big “Yeah” for Germany winning its first World Cup game 4:2, I watched it on Spanish television.