Day 1:
Arriving in Madrid
Day 2: Madrid to Toledo to Cordoba
Day 3: Cordoba to Granada
Day 4: Granada to Costa del Sol
Day 5: Costa del Sol
Day 6: Costa del Sol to Gibraltar to Seville
Day 7: Seville
Day 8: Seville to Lisbon
Day 9: Lisbon
Day 10: Lisbon to Salamanca
Day 11: Salamanca to Madrid
Day 12: Madrid
Day 13: Madrid (extra day after tour ends)
Friday, September 1, 2000
Our second day in the Costa del Sol was a completely free day with absolutely nothing on the itinerary. Seventeen people had decided to take a special (non-Contiki sponsored) day trip to Morroco that left at 6:30AM (while I'm sure that some people didn't return from Joy until this time anyway). I myself decided to use this day to recover and just relax.
I woke up at around 9:30AM to make sure that I would be able to catch breakfast before it closed a half hour later. I found 5 of my fellow "drinking mates" from the night before having breakfast, all looking pretty tired; nobody was actually hung over. It was over breakfast that we heard about two guys from our group hooking up with two ladies, also from the group. They were apparently stumbling around one of the upper hallways in the hotel, shortly after we had gotten back, making enough noise to wake up the most of the corridor. I heard and saw nothing as my room was on the ground floor and I was probably comatose.
After breakfast, we went and sat down or lied in the lawn chairs beside the pool. It was a very cloudy morning and we were urging the sun to pop out and send some heat down towards us. A few more Contiki people joined us as we veged out by the pool. It was clearly evident that everyone was very tired from the night before. Some people would not wake up or leave their hotel rooms until the afternoon. We were all just lying around, collecting our thoughts on the night before. Federico was still being called Fernando, so much that we had to pause and think every time we wanted to call him by his real name. Bash taught him the word "smart-ass", to which Federico began to use quite often in his conversations. By the late morning, a group of us decided to take a bus down to Figuera and lie around the beach there. We found one beach that wasn't so appealing (photo below), as it was rather small and crowded. We walked a little further down to another beach that was stretched along the shore as far as the eye could see, where we eventually planted ourselves for the remainder of the afternoon. There were many women at the beach walking around and lying around topless. Unlike in North America, it wasn't a big deal at all for women here to go topless. Admittedly, there were quite a number of women there who should NOT have gone topless...
On one of several beaches in Figuera: Me, Linda,
Landi, Petula, Mary Cris, Maria, and Louisa, Delia is behind the camera
The sun finally broke out from behind the clouds and was shining on us very strongly. I took a break from the sunbathing and laziness to look for a pair of more formal shoes than what I had brought with me, as Jacquie informed us that there would be upcoming nights out that required it. I also needed a new pair of shoes for a few upcoming formal occasions back home anyway. Delia accompanied me as we walked through Figuera. I ended buying a pair of suede shoes for less than $50 Canadian and picked up a real pair of swimming shorts (I had forgotten to pack a pair and was just using a regular pair of shorts in the water). So with my swimming shorts on and my shoe shopping done, we headed back to the beach to work on our tans. It certainly didn't take very long before we noticed an extra dark tint in our skin. The sun was very hot and so was the sand on the beach. We would feel the soles of our feet burn as we stepped foot onto the sand.
Some of us decided to head back to the hotel at 5:00PM, with plans to get together for dinner later that night. I myself took a quick dip in the pool back at the hotel and found Mandy and Magda taking in a drink of sangria. They were joined by David (who hailed from South Africa) and Alex (from Holland). None of them had woken up before noon and they had not left the hotel all day; they had just been in and out of the hotel pool. I did notice that most people, when they saw me for the first time during the day, would ask me, "So how do you feel today?" Hmm, makes me wonder if I did more that I recollect..?
It was getting late and people were getting hungry. Most of the group decided to head back down to Figuera to find dinner. Much of this group had been on the day trip to Morocco or not been out of the hotel all day, so they wanted to see the beach. A very small number stayed in. Meanwhile, a group of 11 of us, who had spent the whole day at the beach already, decided to take the local bus up to the quaint little town of Mijas instead and find a place there for dinner. We waited at the bus stop just outside of our hotel, in near darkness, with the exception of light from the hotel and car headlights zooming by once in a while. It wasn't until about 45 minutes later that the bus finally arrived just after 10:00PM. In less than 10 minutes, we were in Mijas, where it was very quiet, with most shops completely closed for the night. We did find a small strip of restaurants where we sat down for a very late dinner. Everyone had food ranging from chops to fish and chips, all with pitchers of sangria to wash it down (just what we needed was more alcohol after the night before; all who were at our table sharing the 10 bottles of wine the previous night were also present on this night).
Dinner in Mijas: Bash, Delia, Audrey, Mary Cris,
Gerardina, Maria Cristina, Me, Naureen, Roni (in back), and Federico (in
front) - Eric is taking the picture
It was nearly half past midnight when we all headed back to our hotel via taxis. But instead of going to bed, we all congregated in Eric's room. Like me, he didn't have a roommate either. He had a couple of bottles of wine for us to polish off, which we did so without much effort. We eventually dispersed back to our own rooms. It was around this time that I began to feel a cold coming on. The temperature is way over 30ºC most of the day everywhere we go, and here I was coughing and blowing my nose. Audrey had actually got a cold from sitting underneath the air conditioning unit on the flight from Toronto, so I guess I and everybody else who got sick on the trip (yes, there were several of us) could blame her :-) What was probably more likely for me was that it was from popping in and out of cold shops and buildings, or even from getting in and out of the pool or the water by the beach. I would get the brunt of the blame from a few others who would eventually get sick on this trip ;-)
> DAY 6: Costa del Sol to Gibraltar to Seville >
