From Calci, Italy to Zahora, Spain

We arrived yesterday at our beach rental in Zahora, Spain after a couple of days of adventures on the road.  There were a lot of moving parts (planes, trains and automobiles) and I predicted we'd have some problems along the way!

First off - dinner the night before our trip.  We planned to cook but got a bit lazy.

The day of our trip started with our taxi arriving 6 minutes late (!) at our home in Calci.  Not  big deal, since we didn't even have our train booked yet.  The plan was to just take the taxi to the train station and buy the first ticket available to Bologna.  We had carefully pre-weighed all our bags since Ryan Air has very strict size and weight requirements (as they'd been reminding me, 2 or 3 emails a day, for the past 2 weeks).

We arrived at the train station, bought our tickets, and then had an hour or so to kill before our departure, so we had a nice relaxing coffee and breakfast at a cafe at the station.

Our train departed on time, and the first leg (to Florence) took about an hour.  This left us about a half hour to find the platform for the next leg (Florence to Bologna), and we even had time to grab a snack and drink on the way.  The Bologna train was a newer, high-speed train and did the trip in about a half hour.  For some reason we were assigned tickets on 2 different cars - 2 adults on one car and a child on the other.  So I took the child ticket and sat in car 11 on my own :-(  There was a minor adventure when the conductor checked my ticket.  "Ragazzo?  You're no ragazzo!"  I explained that the ragazzo was on a different car with my adult ticket.  Luckily the conductor spoke a little English.  (However I had a backup plan!  The fellow sitting next to me was Chinese (I overheard him speaking Chinese on the phone) and could also speak Italian (I overheard him speaking Italian to one of the other passengers) so if the conductor gave me a hard time over my "ragazzo" ticket I planned to enlist him as a translator and explain the situation to him in Chinese.  "儿子有我的火车票。他跟他的妈妈坐在别的车。等等。。。"  Eventually the conductor would just get frustrated and walk away.  I'm slightly disappointed I never had to invoke my special backup plan!)

We arrived in Bologna on time, found our hotel with no difficulties, and were checked in and exploring the town by 3:10 PM.  This is about 3 hours earlier than I expected.  So far everything was running tickety-boo.

Our initial impressions of Bologna were not great.  We were in the university district and I assume the student ghetto.  There was a lot of graffiti on the walls!

We found a nice piazza, picked up some literature from the tourist information booth,  and sat down for a drink.

Afterwards we went for another wander around town, through some of the more tourist-oriented neighbourhoods this time.  Bologna has a very tall tower that I wanted to climb (498 steps, almost twice the height of the Leaning Tower) but it was closed.  Maybe next time (Our return trip also goes through Bologna but right now we're undecided as to whether to spend another night here, or try to make it back to Florence to overnight.)

"The two towers."

For dinner we tried a variety of Bolognese dishes.

Sonya has promised to guest-blog and explain what some of this food actually is!

We had an early 4 AM wake-up the next day to make our 6:30 flight to Seville.  We had booked a cab for 5 AM but it was 6 minutes late (!)  What is it with Italian cabs all being exactly 6 minutes late???  However he more than made up the time, arriving at the airport in a little over 10 minutes.  (The hotel guy predicted it would take 20-25 minutes, and it would have if I were driving.  Not saying the taxi guys was a crazy driver or anything ...)

At the airport, checking into our Ryan Air flight, we found that the immigration people in Rome had forgotten to stamp our passports!  "It's not your fault," the Ryan Air lady told us, but now what?  She was on the phone explaining the situation to someone in Italian and we were standing there fidgeting wondering what was to become of us.  Eventually she just gave us our passports back and sent us on our way.  Non problema ...

Our flight had no assigned seats.  They bussed us out to the plan and there was a stampede for the airplane!  (I'd like to see Ryan Air try to operate this way in China, they have similar stampedes for the airplane even with assigned seats!)  We arrived in Seville, collected our luggage, and picked up our rental car.  According to Google it was now an 18 minute drive to our hotel.  Actually it turned out to be an uneventful 18 minute drive to the vicinity of our hotel, and then a 35 minute drive around the narrow one-way and restricted access roads of downtown Seville trying to get onto our hotel's street pointing in the right direction to actually get to our hotel.  Eventually we gave up and parked in a nearby public lot.

We were a few hours early for check-in so we stopped for a snack, did a short walking tour of the old Jewish quarter, had another snack (yes this is a theme for this holiday) and then wandered over to our hotel to check in.

Seville is a very beautiful city!  It has an interesting mixture of old and new, and according to our guidebook everything new is mired in controversy - the tram that runs into the central plaza, the gigantic mushroom sculptures ...

The garbage cans here look like R2D2.  I think they have built-in compactors.

Classy Seville graffiti.

These religious mosaics are everywhere!

Personally I think the gigantic mushroom sculptures are kind of neat but I can't imagine what possessed someone to built these right in the middle of old Seville.  We had dinner (tappas) fashionable early at 10 PM.  The tappa bar we picked was crazy!  You had to order at the bar, and then somehow the tappa bartender would remember your order and call out to you when it was ready.

And somehow they remembered our full order when it was time to pay the bill and leave.  Crazy.

The next day we packed up and drive to Zahora.

Breakfast.  Lots of chocolate with a bit of pastry to hold it together.

Zahora is in the south of Spain, on the Portugal side of Gibraltar, about a 2 hour drive from Seville.  We managed to get from A to B without getting lost at all!  Of course this meant that we were many hours early for check-in, as we had built in lots of time into our schedule to get lost, drive around trying to find the correct route, etc.  But we managed to drop ff our luggage at the house, wander down to the beach (about a 50 M walk!) and found a nice beach cafe for a drink and a snack.  Later on we checked in and then drove into nearby Barbate to pick up some groceries.  (I won't say that the beach cafe was overpriced, but we picked up a weeks worth of groceries, including plenty of wine and beer, for about the same price as our beach snack.)

Our beach rental is quite spectacular!  On the ground level is a kitchen, dining room and living room.  Second floor (or first floor as they say here in Europe) has 2 bedrooms and a banyo.  There is a small patio outside the master bedroom with a walkup to a rooftop deck.

(I'll post more pics of our place here in Zahora, likely on a slow day when I don't have much else to post about.)

Pretty hard to take.  We are here for a week and plan to do lots of relaxing on the patio, relaxing on the beach, eating and drinking.  We are thinking of a day trip over to Tangier, Morocco, and there are a couple of other possible day trips in this area, but for the most part we are planning to relax and recover from our harrowing journey from Calci!