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Tuesday, 14 November. We went out on our balcony
before going down for breakfast. The view across the hotel pool to the
Mediterranean was terrific. This was the day for the
Gibraltar tour. My cold was very bad,
so I decided to stay at the hotel to see the doctor, then just read and rest. Tom and Kyoko had
already decided to skip the tour, so Jane went by herself. She had a great time.
Gibraltar was captured by the British in 1704 and was officially designated as British territory in 1713. A runway, built largely on rubble fill, marks the border with Spain. It crosses the main road, so traffic has to wait when a plane is landing. The bus took the group through the town to a small cemetery at the end, where they took some of the several taxies (vans) waiting there for tourists to hire them for a tour of the "Rock". The driver pointed out major points of interest Jane could see from the van as they climbed on very narrow roads. She also saw some of the famous Barbary apes (really monkeys) along the roadside.
The van stopped at a memorial near the top of the Rock. The view was somewhat hazy, but she could make out the southernmost tip of Europe, and also Morocco eight mile across the water. On the way back down, they stopped to visit St Michael's Cave, which had been made into a hospital during the World War II but was never needed as such. It's full of interesting stalagmites and stalactites. One part of the cave has been converted to a concert hall/theater with great acoustics. The bus got Jane back to the hotel a little after five. At eight we had dinner in the hotel with Tom and Kyoko. Wednesday, 15 November. We woke up to a cool and rainy day, quite unusual (they tell us) on the semi-arid Costa del Sol. The scheduled events for the day were a lecture, "Spain: Past, Present, Future" at 10 a.m., followed by a visit to a jewelry factory. The lecture was excellent. The Buste jewelry "factory" was, as is usually the case on tours, a tiny, token workshop with a huge display room selling all kinds of jewelry at inflated prices. After the tour, I took the bus back to the hotel, had lunch at the Trillo restaurant across the street from the hotel, then read and rested. Jane, Tom and Kyoko stayed in downtown Torremolinos and visited San Miguel, its biggest shopping street, on a hill above the sea. Afterwards, they walked down the long, stairway, lined with shops, to the wide, tiled promenade along the beach and followed that back to the hotel. We all spent about an hour in the hotel lounge enjoying the free drinks . After dinner at the hotel, I went back to the room while the others went back to the lounge for the nightly musical performance. |
