Road trip!

My sixth sense has failed me. I thought for sure that Grenada was going to be perfect. I had pictured us smiling for pictures and gazing pensively at the architecture during a visit to the Alhambra. Wrong.

First - you're supposed to buy Alhambra tickets in advance online. Several people told us that there are a fixed number of tickets also available for same day purchase - you show up there and it's first come first serve. We knew many people who got tickets this way especially around this time of year. 

We weren't sure which day we'd be in Granada since we were hell bent on being "flexible" about every days' plans, so we decided this was the game we wanted to play too. 

Two days ago we had planned this day trip, but it's 2.5 hrs from Sevilla and we needed to leave by about 8am which meant a 6:30 wakeup. Well - of course that is the one night when jetlag decided to rear its ugly head and we both laid wide awake in bed till...you won't believe it...5am!! So we quickly ditched the Grenada trip and rescheduled it for today.

Today had its problems too. For starters, the laundry place where we dropped our clothes yesterday didn't actually get around to doing the laundry. And they don't speak a lick of English. So we lost some time before we even left and headed out on the trip. (Tomorrow's update will let you know the fate of our laundry - we are all completely out of umm...important garments...so things are getting really interesting now!) :-@

Finally we hit the road. It was an eventful ride and we enjoyed seeing the countryside. Not much between here and Grenada so we just zipped right along and got there by about noon. Headed straight to the Alhambra to get our tickets so we'd know our assigned entry time.

We stood in the not-too-long but incredibly slow line. About 20 minutes and 5 steps later they announced that the day visit tickets were sold out and only night visit (after 8pm) and gardens were available. So we thought OK, we're here, let's at least see the gardens even though it's the dead of winter. 15 minutes and 3 steps later, the announcement notified us that the gardens were sold out, reminded us that tickets are only sold for same day visits so tomorrow was apparently not an option. We were super disappointed to not make it into Alhambra!

We ended up spending the rest of the day shopping in Grenada's Centro (old town downtown) and got back to Seville around 9pm. It was such a cute area and streets and streets of stores. We mostly window shopped, bought a couple of things, and had a pretty enjoyable afternoon.

Our treat for the day - chocolate cake in bed at the end of a long but what turned out to be fun day!