Road trip.

After a busy and tiring week we made it back to Spain on a very good Ryannair flight from Marrakech to Seville. For all the people who have had bad experiences with this airline our experience was great. The plane was on time, the staff were pleasant and the flight uneventful. And we made sure we printed our own boarding pass so as not have to pay £70 for them to print it for us.... Must be a pretty sweet printer they use.

 

Lovely. And sunny.

 

Ah Seville! Warm and floral scented. People skating and biking, running, wandering and eating. Lots to see and do.

 

The best thing about Seville is the food. There are loads of really good tapas restaurants and bars that are out on really pretty streets. Lots of orange trees and lovely laneways.

 

Yum. O.

 

 

And the Cathedral. It's a beauty. Not as good as Well's, but bloody big and impressive. So big that it rates as the third biggest church in the world. It was originally the site of a mosque, being in the southern part of Spain where the Moors had the most influence, and was built up into a church in the 1400's. Christopher Columbus is buried there and, well, it's just cool.

 

The inside...

 

The outside.

 

 

We decided the best way to see as much as we could in a short time was to rent a car and drive through Andalucia. Renting the car and driving out of Seville was surprisingly easy and the driving was a pleasant meander over the gently winding roads. Past gigantic fields of olives and almonds and wheat.

 

Ronda was crazy it is so huge now. The bull ring is just the same though as is the old part of town. These all look much the same as they did many years ago although now everything is so much cleaner and the roads are really very good thanks to European money.

 

The bridge at Ronda is a marvel of masonry and a beautiful structure. Oh yes, Paul chopped off all his hair.

 

Short and sweet.

 

 

Down the windy, windy roads (is that windy or windy?) - the wriggly one. Very steep at the sides so don't look down. Windy down past the terraces of olives to Casarabonela and keep on looking ahead until yes! there it is! Arggh! What's that?

 

El Sartillo.

 

El Sartillo, where I lived for a couple of years many moons ago, slowly turning into dust in the middle of the orange field. That was a sad sight. Nice to see it though. And Siri's parents place all locked up with a huge gate looking fierce.

 

Time to move on... Along the tiny windy road to Alora, the back way, then to El Chorro still a fantastic sight. The walkways and the bridge were built as an access way to the hydro electric scheme in the 1920's. now it's super popular with climbers.

 

Feeling brave?

 

 

Next it was up into the mountains above Antequerra to El Torcal, those timeless rock are always amazing to see. I hadn't realised you can see all the way to Malaga from here.

 

Some nice rock piling, courtesy of the weather.

 

And eventually, after a super 400km drive, we made it to Granada.