Trip Report #1-2000:Rota,Spain

Posted from Rota, Spain 

April 11, 2000

Ola!

    We are still in Rota, having arrived here on March 21. We left the US on March 15 and spent several days in Madrid, seeing some of the sites we missed the first time we were there. Madrid is a beautiful city with wonderful monuments and parks and interesting architecture, particularly the balconies, everywhere.

    We took a guided tour in a double-decker bus to orient ourselves. There are quite a few bus companies in Madrid that provide these tours and it pays to shop around a bit, as we found that the price for almost identical tours varied from 1200 pesetas (~$7.20 US) to 3600 pesetas (~$21.60). We toured the Palacio Real  and also spent quite a bit of time marveling at the extensive collection of Picassos, Miros, Dalis and more at the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.

    We arrived in Rota to find that our boat had fared very well during the winter and that the packages of boat stores and supplies had arrived already. The winter in  Spain had been fairly mild and, although the boat was covered with a layer of muddy sand, blown here as a dark red dusty sand from the coast of Africa, there was no dirt or mold below decks.  We spent 8 days living on the boat on the hard while we polished the topsides, installed a repaired propeller and painted the bottom.   The boat was launched on March 28 and it was so good to be back in the water again.

    On the same day the boat was launched, son David arrived from the US for a short visit. While he was here we purchased a mobile phone. He speaks Spanish much better than we do and he was enormously helpful to us while we were negotiating the sale, setting up the telephone plan  (distinguishing among various plans is as confusing here as it is in the US, but it's much worse doing it in a foreign language), and working through the instructions, which were written in Spanish. While David was here , we did some tourist things. We took in the Royal Andalusian Equestrian show in Jerez. 

    We  visited Cadiz and toured the Castillo San Sebastion and the Torre Tavira, a watch tower with a hidden camera that provides a moving image of the surrounding town  and a guide pointing out all of the points of interest in Cadiz. A highlight of David's visit was a trip to Granada. We drove to Granada and met with friends of David, Gavi and Martina, a very nice, bright, hospitable young couple.  Gavi is preparing for his Ph.D defense at the university there and Martina is fluent in 9 languages and does freelance interpreting . 

They live in a terrific graduate student-type apartment across from the Alhambra.

We toured the Alhambra the next day, enjoying the main palace and gardens and the ruins of the medina or surrounding city.

    The drive to and from Granada takes about 4 1/2 hours through rolling hills and olive groves to the mountains, snow covered behind the sprawling city . We think it's the most beautiful countryside that we have seen in Spain, to date.

    It is now back to work.  Before we left to return to the US in November, 1999, Tom and I made a list of things we needed to bring back with us. It included too many things to carry back with us and so, as soon as we got home, Tom started ordering things from catalogs and sending packages back to the marina in Rota. He sent packages by less expensive surface mail, mailing 2-3 months before our anticipated arrival back in Rota, in order to insure that everything would get here before we did. Click here if you are interested in the list of needed boat parts and supplies. We were careful to mark each package "boat stores" or "boat supplies" in order to avoid having to pay duty on them.

    We are almost ready to depart Rota and will be headed through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. Much depends on the weather, which has been unusual here. The jet stream is meandering right over us bringing one low pressure system after another with associated gale conditions, up to Force 8, to the area.

Hasta Luego,

Peg & Tom