Granaga

On the way home we had to fill up the car. We only put a half a tank in... Where is a Sam's club when you need it???

Yep! 29 Liters, at $.79 (Euros) for a total of $23.55 (the dollar and the Euro are about equal). We roughly figured that an standard SUV would take about $120.00 to fill up completely... Who needs SUV's!!!

On Thursday we set out for the Alhambra Palace in Granada. Marietta has the Big Chicken... Spain has The Big Bull... I fumbled to get the camera in time but didn't quite get it, so if this looks good enough to be a post card... well it is. Granada was inland and the drive was interesting. Rolling hills with olive groves, and cities that are placed far apart, don't run out of gas out there!
	Granada is a large city (and given our ability to get lost, we got to see quite a bit of it). In Spain it is either city or not. Everyone lives within close quarters of everyone else. It was rare to find a house on a single lot of land, and when you did, it was usually just short of a palace. Most people live in multifamily buildings with narrow streets. The cluster of these buildings do make for pretty landscapes. I took several cool pictures of just roof tops.
It drizzled most of the day in Granada but that didn't dampen our spirits and it actually made the alhambra a prettier shade of green. You have to make an appointment to tour the Alhambra, and we made an afternoon appointment (anticipating our navigational prowess). We started with the tour of the palace grounds (this place is really big). I took TONS of pictures so picking out the best will be very hard. This is the 12 lion fountain. Water runs into it from the four surrounding rooms. What strikes you first about the Alhambra is the ornate detail of everything. Just when you think you've seen the best room in the house, there is a better room around the corner.
These are some of the patterns that were on the walls. Each age had a different one (the pictures just don't do them justice)
	It was really hard to pick out the pictures for this page as there were so many that were really cool. When you tour the Alhambra you can rent "wands". The wands will narrate the tour in whatever language you want. The voice that did the narration was an actor playing Washington Irving (he slept here). He would say "Ah imagine yourself on a lazy day..." or "Ah can you see the summer breeze blowing through the trees..." After awhile the "poetry" got a bit annoying, but it did give you the information that you were looking for.
The next part that we went to was the Alcazaba or the "fort", it has two towers, the Torre Quebrada (the broken tower)and the Torre de La Vela (the watchtower). It probably had the best view of the city and it is when it started raining the hardest. Luckily it blew over fairly quickly. Ah, imaging the soldiers... I couldn't help it, flashback!.
	The Tower overlooked the remnants of the dungeon and the Arms square.
Shortly after we left the military part of the Alhambra the sun came out and everything was even greener than it was earlier
	It was fall... I just thought this was pretty... Imagine yourself a prince in the fall... hee hee...
Now that the rain had stopped we could wander the grounds.
	It was on to the Generalife. The Generalife was the area that was basically a beautiful garden that the royalty could go to to relax... I'm sure that was easy...

	Ah, I could go on for days, but the website would get really redundant at that point,
so we say good-bye to Granada.
On the way home we had to fill up the car. We only put a half a tank in... Where is a Sam's club when you need it??? Yep! 29 Liters, at $.79 (Euros) for a total of $23.55 (the dollar and the Euro are about equal). We roughly figured that an standard SUV would take about $120.00 to fill up completely... Who needs SUV's!!!