Tuesday, May 27, 2003

5-27-03, Tarifa, Spain   Yesterday was quite a day.  We’ve been waiting for the truck registration papers to come for a very long time.   To legally own a British vehicle, all you need is a mailing address, they mail you the official documents.  We were told it would take less than ten days.  We used the address of the apartment where we rented the room.  We didn’t want to hang around London any longer than we had to, we were anxious to get to Seville in time for Easter.  So the guys at the apartment agreed to do us the giant favor and forward the papers when the arrived.  When we got to Seville, after a week or so, we sent them the American Express address there.    I was thinking that hey, the truck is legal, no problem, we can continue to travel and when the papers arrive, have them forwarded.  Then, in a bar (where we do all our travel research) in Portugal, we met a guy who had recently returned from Morocco.  He said he had no problems, but that if our paperwork wasn’t entirely in order we were asking for trouble.  So… no documents, no Morocco.  Emails are flying around, no papers yet.  Then finally, word comes from London, the papers are here, we’ve mailed them.  We’re back in Seville, we’re waiting, no papers.  A week goes by.  We decide to travel to Cordoba, the nearest next stop on the tourist route in southern Spain.  Yeah, the Mosque was nice.  The Feria was interesting, much different than Seville.  Well….Rhona said, we’ve seen this, we’ve done that….  I took her on a Wild Mouse type roller coaster in desperate search of Fun.  She wasn’t impressed.  What we needed was a good destruction derby, but the Spanish don’t consider that an important feature of a fair.  So yesterday morning…  we know when the Amex office gets their mail.  Rhona calls from the campground.  No mail yet.  We decide to pack up, go in search of a ruins nearby.  Instead we see a car wash and decide to get out our frustrations by scrubbing the Truck.  I realize that ruins are closed on Monday.  Tourist stuff in Spain is always closed on Monday.  Must be a law.  Rhona calls from the car wash.  Busy… or the phone is broke, we don’t know.  I’ve got a mad desire to forget about the papers and head to the coast for a couple days… Malaga isn’t that far away…  but it’s dumb, because we’ll be going right through there on the way back from Morocco.  If we ever get to Morocco.  Finally we decide, we’re going back to Seville.  If the papers aren’t there, there must be some experience in Seville that we’ve missed….  As we get close, I make a major decision.  We are going to drive, right into the city.  Right into Plaza Nueva in the center of the downtown with the crazy traffic and confusing street signs, where we have spent hours on foot lost, totally bewildered.  Rhona’s finest hour of navigation!  I maneuver through the streets, the roundabouts, past the man on the horse, past the Cathedral, into the ring of one way streets around the Plaza.  I’m tempted to park in the middle of the lane the way the Spaniards do, but they probably throw Americans in jail for trying that one.  I stop, Rhona jumps out in front of the Amex office.  I start doing laps of the Plaza…  three times around.  She says I just miss her on lap number two.  I come back around and she’s dancing in the street!  Waving a white envelope over her head!    We drive out of the city, just as slick as we drove in…  went right out south, on the same route we (and other folks we met) got horribly lost on previously… drove right to the old campground for a quick pee stop, noticing that they finally filled the pool and everyone seems to be having a great time….  We drove all afternoon, the truck just humming along, down to Cadiz, along the coast towards Gibraltar, to this wonderful campground of my dreams in Tarifa, not too far from Algeciras where we’ll be catching the ferry to Tangier.  This place is a pine forest, but they’re like cypress.  Maybe thirty feet high, a bushy rounded crown, forked trunks like sycamores, not tall and skinny like pines at home.   On the ocean side is a fence, and the fence has an open gate to the beach.  Yes folks, maybe a couple hundred yards from the truck to the water’s edge.  This area is a major wind surfing spot, and this morning we are finding out why.   Last night we had a couple drinks, shared a plate of not so bad Paella, and complemented the bar guy on the place.  He said, yeah, it’s pretty nice all right.  Only problem is the 100 mile an hour winds.  He said that sometimes there will be 60 caravans in the park … the wind will come up, pretty soon there’s only a couple left.  I assume that most of them leave voluntarily.  I noticed the open patio archways in the restaurant, well, between the restaurant and the pool, and from the restaurant to the park, were blocked with that heavy construction wire screen… 4” x 4” that they use like rebar?  I thought maybe for some reason they didn’t want people walking through, but now I realize it’s to keep furniture from flying out of the building.  Oh maybe not.  A hundred mile an hour winds in a campground?  I can just imagine tents filling up and bouncing around the campground like runaway balloons.   Luckily, we are well anchored with this heavy British iron we are driving… and all the crap we are carrying… going to take a lot more than hurricane force winds to bother us…   Its been blowing pretty good all morning.  It’s time to wander down to the beach and see if people actually sail in air like this.  You would think that a round trip to Africa wouldn’t be much of a problem today.   Oh yeah…  we can see Gibraltar, not the classic view of it yet, and Morocco is right over there.  We are resting today, heading to town in a while, see if we can get all this rambling on the Internet….  Tomorrow – Morocco, Finally!     7:21:10 PM    comment []

May 24, 2003 Saturday, Cordoba, Spain   I recently received a message from an ex-co-worker (always wanted to type a word with two hyphens in it) Laura… .  She accused me (tongue in cheek, I hope) of writing these little things with the hope of making the folks back home jealous.  I responded that we’re only trying to set a good example…  but I suppose there is that basic human desire to make others envious of your adventures…  it’s the fuel that powers the souvenir T shirt industry.   But upon reflection, I do realize that I have emphasized the positive parts of the trip, and glossed over the more difficult.  For example, right now Rhona and I definitely need a vacation vacation.    She’s got blisters on both feet, I’ve got a sore calf muscle and a bruise spot on the heel beneath that same calf muscle… so you see, the tourist life is not easy.  We are expected to walk up and down on steep cobblestone streets dodging zooming cars and mufflerless motorbikes, lugging our backpacks filled with crap we won’t need until next month, taking pictures almost constantly.  It’s amazing my shutterbutton finger remains unblistered.   And the irritations we have to put up with.  This morning I was awakened by the first of a (so far) unending series of pop-pop-pop sounds outside the van.  Our “spot” is right on the main route to the bathrooms, and 90 percent of the visitors that that establishment are wearing flip-flops emitting this loud, damp sounding POP with each step.  It’s amazing that there have been no reports of berserk campers attacking flip-flop wearers with tire irons…  Or perhaps it’s just a media conspiracy to cover up this likely daily occurrence to protect the industry we are all a part of… there goes another one, pop-pop, pop-pop, pop-pop.  Nice looking young woman, where did I put that tire iron….   She got away.  And today.  We face the prospect of another one.  Another Feria.  Totally by accident we just happened to have come to Cordoba just in time for their annual Spring Feria.  The very same carnival, the same circus, the same bull fighters as in Sevilla.  We know this because on our first (limping) walking to town yesterday, we saw the posters plastered on every wall and telephone pole.  The same lady lion tamer.  The same guy dressed up like a Arabian Sultan who seems to do something rude with large alligators… or it least, the one on the poster seems to be pretty huge.  Pop-pop, pop-pop.  I could be more accurate, just assume the popping goes on constantly in the background, interrupted occasionally by the sounds of small pinging diesel engines struggling to maneuver oversized vans through tiny openings.  But this Cordoba spring fair… well, we have to go, we can’t spend the day recuperating in the campground.  The tourist code demands that we ride busses crammed full of equally sweaty strangers, and walk for blocks and blocks of rough stone streets dodging not only the aforementioned cars and scooters, but also… no doubt, hundreds of terrified horses, ridden by intoxicated young Spaniards who may well be excellent horsemen and women, but are faced with the challenge of controlling a thousand pounds of panic stricken animal while maintaining the utmost image of aristocratic cool while clutching their cell to an ear and shouting, “Donde?  Donde?”  Where are you, where are you?    And now the damn sun moved again, just a moment, while I slide my chair closer the van shade.  Yesterday was very hot here.  Cordoba is known as the frying pan of Europe.  I’m known as the fat piece of lard sizzling in the pan.  I must have drank a gallon of various liquids yesterday, all of which immediately, in some miracle of bodily processing, turned to sweat and evaporated on contact with the air.   Yesterday I was having one of my (rather rare) just-can’t-face-another-beer days.  They have these large milkcarton style containers of Sangria here.  They are too big for our little camping van refrigerator, and somehow with all the crap we’ve collected (more on that later) we haven’t sunk so low to actually buy a cooler to keep stocked with ice and drinks.  You can believe it’s in the back of my mind though… only the thought that one more little “convenience” like that and all four tires will blow and both axles will piledrive into the dirt.  Anyway… the Sangria carton is a wonderful invention…  the Sangria itself isn’t that great, just fruit juice and red wine.  At that little bar on the beach we had real Sangrias made right before our eyes… Triple Sec, white rum, lots of fresh fruit.  I keep thinking about picking up the necessary ingredients to turn the cardboard box stuff into the real thing, but then there’s that part about the tires….    You see, we have this little van we’ve been living in now for, gee, almost exactly two months.  And from day one we’ve been adding little things to make it more comfortable, better organized.  We are so comfortable, so organized… well, things have gotten out of hand.  I guess if we had a garage we could have a garage sale.  I do not have anything tied on top.  I know that comes as a shock to many, especially Denny, but it’s the tire thing, you see.  That and the knowledge that the gas mileage might drop to the point that making it from one station to another might become iffy.   We just passed through two campgrounds in a row that had stashes of used English paperback books.  Rhona and I both favor the jumbo models, doorstop variety.  What with our library of maps and guidebooks, I’m sure our load of reading material is nudging up around a hundred pounds.  Now, laying around the house at home, absolutely no problem.  In the van… well, it’s challenging.  The big problem is creative storage.  I mean, it’s not so bad if you find a nice little place, a nook, a cranny perhaps, to stash something so that it’s likely to be there the next time you go looking.  But the fresh idea… that’s the danger.  Because next time – it won’t be in that nice little nook.  It will be in the fifteenth cranny you check.  My coffee cup is a major problem.  We hit the road in the morning… usually before I’ve actually finished my coffee… in that great combo French-press pot/coffee cup Kara got for me.  Marvelous invention.  But it is a bit large, kind of an inconvenient shape.  But, usually it ends up on the floor next to my seat as we head off down the road.  Sometimes in the big white box behind my seat.  Well… yesterday we left rather slowly, knowing that we’d only be driving for an hour and a half or so, from Seville to Cordoba, so there was really no rush.  And it was already pretty hot, and the beverage conversion to sweat process was already well underway.  So I finished my coffee.  Dumped the grounds, and actually rinsed out the apparatus.  Now what to do?  Time for creative storage.  So…  therefore…  as a direct result…  this morning, no coffee cup.  And of course, the van is in bed mode.  Which means to search the usual places, cushions have to be lifted, sheets pulled back, it’s a mess.  And of course, having done that, trashed the bed… which wouldn’t have been all that bad except that Rhona was still in it (oh there’s another subject to amaze the friends and relatives, there has been a role reversal… she’s the one who sleeps in!)  the cup is nowhere to be found.  Creative Storage.  Knowing that I had put it somewhere really clever was no help at all.  You would think (if you’ve never lived in a horizontal phone booth for two months) that there could not be that many places a coffee cup could be hidden.  Well… there are.  It’s hell, folks, absolute Hell.   Okay the popping sound is getting closer, either some camper has the power to read minds and is coming with a tire iron of his own, or Rhona is done with trip to the ladies.  I’m due for my second shower of the day, but I’ll probably pass on that in favor of my first Sangria.  Time to get into Feria going mode.     7:19:17 PM    comment []