Saturday we got up, packed up, checked out and took off:
Again, I was too busy driving to take pictures, but here are some things that I noticed along the way:
Our resort in (well, not in, but right next to) Fuengirola (fwen-he-ROW-la, approximately) was a Club La Costa resort - no relation, apparently, to the La Costa in San Diego. It was a step up from the one in Calpe, with the front desk staffed 24/7, and free wi-fi in the lobby. It also had more guests. And the bathroom had a bathtub that worked, and the shower had decent water pressure. It also had a bidet.
The area was also very different. More built up, more touristy, more signs in English. In fact, there are a large number of Brits who live here all or part of the year. One guidebook said, "Most of the foreign visitors are British - you'll find beans on your breakfast plate and Tom Jones for Muzak. Spanish visitors complain that some restaurants have only English menus, and indeed, the typical expats here actually try not to integrate... They enjoy English TV and radio, and many barely learn a word of Spanish." Sad.
The resort has several restaurants, but this being the off season, only one was open. So we got a take-out dinner from the restaurant, ate it in our room, got settled in, and went to bed.
The balcony of our unit looked up the coast to the North. I took several pictures from the balcony, and I tried to merge three of them into a panoramic shot showing what the view looked like. It's not perfect - I couldn't get the pictures to line up exactly - but it should give you an idea:
And here's a picture of our room:
The next morning, we headed off to visit Greg and Ginette. And I discovered another interesting wrinkle about working with a GPS. By this time, I had pretty much figured out how to work with it - when it lost its fix, I knew how to get it back. But what I discovered this morning is that a GPS is only as good as its map database.
There are two basic kinds of GPS programs. One kind doesn't store its map data on your device, but maintains a connection to a server on the Internet, and constantly fetches data in real time. But the cost of Internet access on a phone while out of the country is ruinous, so that option was out. My GPS program was the other kind, that stores map data on the phone, and so doesn't need an Internet connection.
But the problem there is that the data you have might be out of date. I downloaded a database update just a month or so before I left, but even that wasn't enough. It seems there's a brand new section of highway on the outskirts of Malaga:
...that wasn't in my program's database. So I'm driving along, and I suddenly realize that my GPS shows my location in the middle of nowhere! We used that stretch of road quite a lot in the next few days, and started calling it "The Road That Doesn't Exist."
Greg and Ginette live in the town of Archidona, while their church is in the nearby town of Antequera, about 25 km away. The plan was that we'd meet them at church at 11:00, attend church with them, and then spend the afternoon visiting. So I plugged the addresses of their house and their church into the GPS, and we hit the road. It was about an hour's drive, and we pulled up to the church at about ten minutes to 11:00. But something was wrong. There was no one in sight. We were at the right address, but the place didn't look anything like a church building. I commented to Terry that it looked more like a house than a church... and that's when it hit me.
When I had put in the addresses, I had mislabeled them. We weren't at the church - we were at their house. I quickly looked up the correct church address - it was now about five minutes to 11:00 - and the GPS told me it was about a 25 minute drive.
I made it in twenty. And as it turned out, we hardly missed any of the service, which hadn't started on time.
Here's a picture of Terry and Greg in front of the church:
The service was in Spanish, of course, so I sat politely and had no idea what anyone was talking about. But I did recognize a couple of the songs.
On the walls were several Bible verses, including the entire 23rd Psalm:
Those letters aren't painted on the wall - they're made of wood. Ginette told me that one of the men in the church is a woodworker, and he carved each one of those letters by hand! She said she'd introduce me to him. But before she had a chance, he introduced himself, by coming up to me and, without a word, handing me a piece of wood with the word "Shalom" ("peace" in Hebrew) burned into it. A few minutes later, we crossed paths again, and this time, he handed me the word "Paz" ("peace" in Spanish) carved out of wood. Then Ginette caught up with us and introduced me to Fernando and his wife Charo:
Apparently, he shows up every week with a shopping bag full of wood carvings, and hands them out to everyone. Here are the items he handed to me:
When we got home, I put them up on our living room wall, near some folk art crosses that we have hanging there. I then emailed the picture to Greg, and asked him to show it to Fernando (you did show it to him, didn't you, Greg?).
After church, we all went to lunch at a restaurant in Antequera, and then drove back to their house in Archidona, where we spent the afternoon visiting with Greg and Ginette, and their two sons, Connor (17) and Pascal (13). Their sons are great kids. Pascal, in particular, was delighted to have someone to speak English with, and he certainly made the most of the opportunity!
Before we left, I took a picture of the family:
Unfortunately, Connor's face is blurred in the picture. He mentioned that at the time, but it didn't look too bad on the camera's small screen, so I didn't bother taking another shot. But when I looked at it on the computer, it looked much worse than I thought. So I should have listened to Connor... my apologies.
I never did take a picture of their house, but courtesy of Google Street View, here's a picture of their street:
If I remember right, that yellow building on the right is their house.
Between Antequera and Archidona is a mountain with the romantic name of La Peņa de los Enamorados, or The Lover's Rock. It gets its name from a local legend about two young Moorish lovers from rival clans, one from Antequera and one from Archidona, who jumped off the rock to their deaths while being pursued by the girl's father. In another version of the story, the young man was a Spaniard and the girl was a Moor.
I never got a picture of the mountain, but I found this one on the Internet:
The mountain is also known as Montaņa del Indio, because if you look at it sideways, it looks like an Indian's head.
We drove back to La Costa, had some dinner at a restaurant in Fuengirola, and that was it for the day. Here's a map:
