I
wish I could say this was one of those planned gastronomic experiences but it
was instead a comedy of errors. Wife
and I started out by wanting to see the Atlantic coast by the ancient city of
Cadiz. But when we looked on the
map we found that it was going to take over 3 hours of driving time. A bit of research found there was a
small city, Tarifa that is the farthest point south in Spain. It is the place where one can stand and
see both the Atlantic and Mediterranean within yards of each other. It is also the place where the Muslims
first landed in their conquest of Visgothic Spain. In fact it is named for the general who led the invasion, el
Tarif. Our research showed it was
a little of two hours away.
But
the best-laid plans often get led astray.
We ended up caravanning with Brother-in-Law who wanted to go by a more
direct/scenic route. 3A and I both
had reservations about this but were not forceful in our protestations. Our fears were well founded. The ‘short’ route was much more winding
and slow than thought, we got behind an incredibly slow truck with no place to
pass, and the ‘scenic coast road’ got us into a major traffic jam in a big
tourist city. We were the only ones
with a GPS so we took over navigating and went by the toll road to finally get
there. As we’re climbing and
descending the final hills to Tarifa, we are enveloped with fog so no views of
Africa which is only around 20 kilometers away over the Mediterranean. Then to add insult to injury, we
couldn’t find any parking and drove round and round for another half hour.
Poor
3.1 was really sick of being in the car seat. The one bright spot was lunch. We were went to a place that seemed pretty normal and had
another excellent fixed price meal.
I had a wonderful gazpacho type soup that was pureed with some small
bits of tuna in it. I had Munchkin
try some and she liked it so much that she ate almost half of it. My main course was tuna in a tomato
onion sauce. They even went out of
the way for SRM and Andrew, two vegetarians with plates of very well executed
grilled veggies. The only bad
thing about lunch is it took a long time but that was not so bad as it gave Munchkin
a chance to run around.
We
finally got to start touring the town around 4 PM. Of course the primary fortress was closed for
renovations. But I did get to see
the Mediterranean/Atlantic confluence.
Med on the left/Atlantic on the right
We needed to get Munchkin back so I left Wife with the other group and
they went on to Gibraltar. #3, 3A,
Munchkin and I got back with only one further incident (going back to our car
the way we had come only to find that we could have gone the opposite direction
and gotten there in three minutes instead of 15). At least the fog had lifted and we saw the rock of Gibraltar
and Africa on our way out.
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