Off the Grid
We had a love/hate relationship with Málaga. Our hotel was a very nice property, but the top two floors were under construction. Jack hammer. Pick axe. Right above us. In a comedy scene straight from Fawlty Towers, the manager offered us another room, as if 10 feet this way or that way would defeat the massive, grinding, structure borne noise emanating from heavy equipment above. Good thing we had plans during most days! John’s studies suffered a little, but he was more than willing to put on head phones and play video games.
Sitting in the parking garage, trying to figure out how to extract ourselves from the form fitting parking space, John plugged my phone into the USB of the car and started to program our next destination. We were treated to Abacab by Genesis at high volume for the 7th time…alphabetically, it is the first song in my itunes library. That is how we start every new leg of the trip now!
I congratulated John-the-navigator as we exited Málaga with zero unplanned u-turns. He said, “not so fast, we still have to get to our next hotel…the cities are the hard part.” We enjoyed a drive through the coastal countryside with a consistent view of the Mediterranean Sea to our left. We even saw the Rock of Gibralter! As we approached the mountainside where our hotel was located we switched to the analog directions given by the hotel- find a specific public parking lot and then call for a taxi to take us within 100 meters of the hotel, then hoof it with all our belongings through the narrow streets. Well, that didn’t work. Once we started winding our way into narrower and narrower streets and steeper inclines, I knew the GPS was taking us the shortest way, but not the smartest way. John said, “all you have to do is make it from here to there on the smartphone. In order to do that we had to drive the wrong way on a one-way street and through what looked like a restaurant patio serving lunch! We started to give it a try, but sanity prevailed and we decided to back out, literally. I asked John what his recommendation was, and he said, “let’s try to go around the mountain instead of over it, and he expanded the scale of the map to find a route. As we tried to wind our way back out and down the mountain, and the streets were getting narrower again, I said to John, “are you sure you have a plan, son?” He was confident...and it worked. Good job, John.
Vejer de la Frontera happens to be a beautiful, whitewashed village on a mountain side. The kind of place where you can get lost if you need to. Seriously, I added it to my list of places that you could go off the grid and “they” would never find you.
John and I took a cooking class from two ladies, a local from Vejer and an expat from Scotland. It was a great way to experience the culture and to learn about the culinary preparations of what we were experiencing. Atún rojo almadraba is the wild tuna caught on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar and served locally. We tried all kinds and even made a salad with the tinned version. John liked it all, except for the “tuna jerky.” We prepared fresh granadas (pomegranates, not grenades and not the city), baked a cake of almonds, orange and lemon; made meat balls of pork- albóndigas de cerdo and carrots with cumin and parsley. The host was a sherry expert. I did not know sherry was a Spanish thing, I always thought it a British libation. It turns out that England’s Sir Francis Drake (whom the Spanish consider a pirate) surprised and destroyed more than 30 ships of the Spanish Armada at Cadiz (near Vejer) in 1587 and made off with 2900 barrels of sherry. Ever since then it has been fashionable for the Brits to drink sherry as a sort of spoil of war. But I digress…neither John nor I was fond of the sherry. The food that we made was out of this world, if we do say so ourselves. While the local chef kind of demonstrated making a tortilla, she didn’t share all the steps with us, so we may not be able to reproduce it. A Spanish tortilla is not flour or corn like in Mexico, it is a crispy, tasty, potato and egg omelet-type contraption that tasted like a french fry cake. Nice.
During our stay in Vejer, John befriended the cat of a tapas restaurant we liked. He named him Christopher (Columbus). He labeled me as heartless because I wouldn’t adopt him as a travel companion. John misses the family dogs.
Halfway from our hotel (under the bell tower) to the hosts house for cooking class. There was no need for an alarm clock, the bells sounded like a car accident with some semblance of a melody right outside our window.
standing on our balcony, you can see why we had to hoof it !
John and Annie work on the carrots and Pepe prepares some jamon for appetizer. I act busy off camera and try not to get in the way.
Layers of Vejer. Annie said that instead of washing the white buildings, they just apply another coat of paint or "white wash." Eventually, the plaster may let go from the weight and reveal many cycles of improvement, or layers of time.
John befriends Christopher and sends snapchat to that effect.