18 hours in Grenada

[April 24]

Continuing with our rushed pace, we reached Grenada by midday and checked into our cute pension (hotel). We had planned on getting there earlier, but literally spent an hour driving around in circles to try to find our place. The city was a maze of one-ways, taxi-only lanes, and just plain confusing. Our first priority was lunch and we found another average meal nearby to fill us up.

Then we were off to see the Alhambra, perhaps one of the best tourist attractions that we've seen so far. The guide book warned us that you may want to spend your entire Grenada visit staying within the Alhambra, and they were correct.



We walked to the area on a forested path. The chestnut trees were in full bloom and the weather was quite pleasant. The Alhambra was at the top of the hill and looked really cool. We finally found the office and waited in line to pick up our reserved tickets, which was really necessary at such a busy spot. In fact, we had to reserve the exact half hour that we could enter the palace area and we could only find the last time of the day even though we reserved five days in advance. After getting the tickets and deciding to upgrade with an audio guide, we strolled to the gardens.

The Generalife gardens were really magical, with really tall sculpted hedges, hanging purple bougainvillea, and several long fountain areas. Then the arrows pointed us into an inner courtyard where surreptitious visits were once made by one the palace's young women and her man. Nearby, there was a stairway with built-in waterfalls passing on what would be the handrail.

Since we had several hours to spend until our specified entry time into the palaces, we took our time to visit all the other areas of the Alhambra and paused for snack breaks and fed the many roaming cats the leftovers. There were also many viewpoints to take in the city and see the mountain range that we had been at earlier.

Another fun area was a garden with a huge reflecting pool. I am the small person in the red shirt at the other side. This was the same pool where we saw a cat fishing for the slow moving koi, but it was distracted by all the people walking by.



My favorite photographic activity was to snap shoots of the different tile designs, usually highlighted with beautiful Arabic scripts. This is one of my 20 tile photos, which I think will make a fun project back at home.



Our day ended after a tour of the palace, which was also very nice, but by this time we were a bit tired. We walked back down into town and found a place to eat some average paella before going to bed early in preparation for a 6 am wakeup.

For more photos of the Alhambra that we didn't take, check out this site of stock photography.