About an hour out of Madrid we went through a small national park with amazing views of rocky precipices.
Driving through La Mancha was great for two reasons: the whole region pays hommage to its hero, Don Quijote, which means loads of windmills, statues of him and his pudgy sidekick Sancho, and references galore. In a restaurant where we stopped for lunch they were selling local sweets with this sentence written on the box: "En un lugar de La Mancha, cuyos dulces no quiero olvidarme..." That should be hilariously funny to anyone who's read DQ recently...
The second reason why it was great is because of the olive trees! The whole landscape is COVERED with lines of olive trees, as far as the eye can see, and they go up and down the hill sides and in and out of all the craggy cliffs of the mountains. It's hard to imagine how people harvest them, the slopes are so steep.
More blankets of olive groves as we enter the Granada province.
It's pretty amazing--or at least it seemed amazing to us--that we told Glenn and Judy that we'd pick them up on a street corner in Malaga on Saturday at 4pm, and it actually worked. We were about 10 minutes late, due to there being virtually no street signs in Malaga. Anyway, after getting loaded up we drove to our timeshare destination and got settled in, enjoying dinner at the restaurant that night.
On Sunday we had a mellow day: took a stroll in the environs and let Sawyer explore a little. Made a great little dinner in the apartment kitchen and played some serious games.
Sawyer is completely obsessed with the muppets right now, and putting some of their music on an mp3 player was one of the ways we got through the long flights (this was a genius idea, thanks, Brigitte). He had a little trouble with the ear buds though, so Gram and Gramps brought him this old school set of ear phones.
But they were a little too big; we're still working on the perfect solution to make them fit properly.
The next day we took a very rainy but beautiful and fun trip to Marbella; pics will be up soon. That night we dined at an Italian place down the street where the waitresses were sitting on their tushes looking for something to do (major off-season syndrome); their solution was to fall in love with Sawyer. They looked for every excuse possible to come by the table and talk to him--sneaking him bowls of potato chips, making sure he had a napkin or a tiny fork, asking compulsively if we had everything we needed, etc. One of them even said, "I love you!!" as we left. He gave them both huge kisses.
It was possibly the happiest night of my life because we ordered some croquetas. Sawyer, suprisingly, amateur de toute friture, did not like them. More for me.
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