| Glenn's Granada Journals 6-11-02 Today is a travel day from Alhaurin El Grande to Granada. Our stay with my distant cousin had been very enjoyable and relaxing and we appreciated his hospitality all the while we were there. We awoke around 8:00 am and prepared for our travel day in the usual way, including repacking and having breakfast before heading out. I had gathered both train information from Malaga to Granada and bus information from Alhaurin El Grande to Malaga. The bus that left at 9:15 am from Alhaurin El Grande would arrive in Malaga around 10:15 am (everything is approximate as you can not predict how many stops the bus will have to make along the way). The approximate 10:15 am arrival into Malaga would allow us to catch the 10:40 am train to Bobadilla where we could catch the 2:15 pm train on to Granada. We would arrive in Granada around 4:00 pm where we would have to locate accomodation for 3 nights before the traveling was over. We caught the 9:15 am bus from Alhaurin El Grande and arrived into Malaga at 10:15 am. So far so good!!! We then walked the few feet to the train station (They are located next to each other) and proceeded to wait in line to buy tickets. Well, sometimes patience can be learned from the Spanish and Italians, as I took ticket # 58 and they were only serving #42 upon our arrival in line. They also only had 2 ticket booths open at the time. Again, the goal being to catch the 10:40 am train as the time slid by while waiting for the 2 ticket booths to help 15 other people before us. (The frustrating part is that you can see employees behind the counters watching the queue build up but not prepared to step up to help.) We finally got to the window a few minutes before our train was ready to leave to buy our tickets. The clerk was very helpful and couldn't understand why we would want to take the train to Bobadilla and wait for 2 hours for the next train to Granada when the bus left every hour for Granada. It took me a little to understand what he was trying to convey but once I figured it out we thanked him and departed back to the bus station. At the bus station we found the counter to purchase bus tickets to Granada and got on the 11:00 am bus. We arrived in Granada at 12:30 pm (3 1/2 hours earlier than we would have by train) and we saved a buck or two to boot. As we were departing the bus station a nice gentleman asked if we were looking for a room. We, of course, said yes and he provided us his business card for a hostel on the outskirts of city center. He quoted us 23 Euro's for a double without bathroom and 33 Euro's with bathroom. We thanked him for the card and grabbed the next bus into town to check it out. Buses for us have been a slight challenge on certain days. We knew the #3 bus went into town but the challenge is when to get off the bus. We had studied our map of Granada and looked for street signs to let us know when to get off. Most of the time we were at least close to where we had planned to get off but once or twice we had missed the mark farther than we had liked. Today we were pretty close to our mark and dropped off on a main street. Once we had located the cross street that we were on we then knew which way to head to find the hostel. We saw a few other hostels along the main strip but knew that they would be plenty noisy and we were not interested in that. We walked down a few back streets and found the street we were looking for. While walking down the street we checked on another hostel right next door to the one that we had learned about in the bus station. The hostel had rather large rooms with bathroom for 30 Euro's and after very little debate we ended up staying there. The rooms were bigger than we had stayed in during the whole trip and included a refrigerator and television. (The television only received Spanish stations so this was of no use, which was ok because we really needed to catch up on a few journals anyway.) After dropping our bags off and cleaning up we headed into the city center. We walked around window shopping, locating the Cathedral and main plazas, and finding information where we could get a map of the city and other usual information. We walked around the city center for about 4 hours and returned to our room around 7:00 pm. One of our stops in our travels included the supermarket where we bought apple juice, milk, cereal, wine, and water. It was always nice to have a refrigerator so you could keep things cold and have snacks or breakfast without having to go out all of the time. We were a little tired from our travel day so we napped for a little while. Well we napped for longer than we expected, ended up having dinner in the room (cereal), reading for a while before falling asleep around 1:00 am. |
| A beautiful garden at the Alhambra in Granada. |
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