Stories from the Road – Jerez, Tarifa, and Granada

Posted by Taylor , Dec, 2008 @ 12:00 am

Stories from Jerez, Tarifa and Granada. These were three of the cities we visited while on the Trans-Iberian road trip !

Jerez was supposed to be a day trip on the way to Cadiz, but when we got into Cadiz for the first time we couldn´t find a hostel, we went 0 for 10, so we went back to Jerez and spend the night there.

For the day trip, we walked around the city, and took a tour of a Sherry vineyard. It was an interesting learning experience, but since I don’t like Sherry, the tasting was not too special.

Tarifa is a very pretty town, it´s the southernmost point of Europe from which you can see Morocco across the water. We enjoyed it a lot, and got some beach time out of it. The beaches are nice, and there are lots of water sports. Windsurfing is very popular, and most places offer lessons. If you are there for a few days and want to learn, it might be fun to sign up for a class. If you just want to tour around, there are lots of ferrys that run from Tarifa to Morocco everyday.

Granada was awesome. Really lively town, and very cool to see so much Muslim influence around. Doner Kebob restaurants (which have probably constituted 1 out of every 4 of our meals) were a dime a dozen, and delicious, and there was a cool market with lots of shops and hookah bars. We went out on the town and while we were at this bar called Dolce Vita, we met a group of awesome girls from Oklahoma and hung out with them for the rest of the night. The highlight of the night came as we were walking out of Dolce Vita and found an orange tree. A few people climbed up and picked a couple of oranges. At the sight of this, this angry young drunk guy came over and started yelling at us. He was speaking very fast and my Spanish isn´t what it used to be, but I´m pretty sure what he said consisted of: “Hey, American, you can´t just climb a tree and pick oranges here” (directed at Erin) followed by “Maybe in Peru that´s how it works, but not in Granada” (huh?). The guy then proceeded to grab the oranges out of my grubby Peruvian hands and throw them over a large fence, where they would be inaccessible to us. Very funny.

From the driver…

We had a pretty long drive to Valencia, which is really cool, except for the goddamn traffic lights. Literally every large Spanish city we have driven in has found a new way of making my life miserable behind the wheel of Berthão. In Madrid, it was tiny streets and really busy traffic circles. These wouldn´t have been too bad, except there would always be four lanes going into a traffic circle, then two lanes inside the traffic circle, and three or four lanes again exiting, making the entire process a clusterfuck. In Sevilla, it was an abundance of one way streets, and the fact that it was impossible to ever make a left turn because there were never any damn left turn lanes. Argh. Valencia seemed like it was going to be great, until I started hitting traffic lights. For some reason, the Spanish think it´s a good idea to put traffic lights on your side of an intersection rather than across the intersection where you can clearly see it. Once I´m pulled up to a light, I can´t see it, because it´s above me.

In Valencia, they have decided to address this problem in the following way: there are two sets of lights at every intersection, one directly above my head and one across the intersection. When the light above my head turns red, the light across the intersection starts flashing yellow. When making a left or right turn, a flashing yellow means go, but cautiously. In this case, however, the flashing yellow apparently means “watch out, there´s a red light above your head”. I think this message would be appropriately conveyed by a RED LIGHT. Additionally, when a light goes from green to red here, it´s yellow for like half a second. It took me I think 4 red lights run in a row last night to figure this out. Driving is a serious adventure….

Tags: Europe, Granada, Jerez, Spain, Tarifa, travel