Road Trip from Pamplona to Frigiliana

We were on the road by 8:00, heading south.  In Spain they do not put any hints about east/west/north/south on their signs.  They just put the name of a town that is ahead, usually a major one.  We americanos miss the sense of direction greatly, especially as we occasionally head off in the wrong direction, not really knowing which towns are relevant all the time as we are relying on erratic GPS information through the phones.  Not my problem, I just go where they tell me when it is my turn to drive and if we get off course they eventually find us and get us back on track.

We drove through big agricultural spaces all day long. In the morning it was mostly vineyards, patchworked up the hills on both sides of the roads, in addition to olives and green cover crop.  Both today and on the trip from Barcelona there were big wind turbines on the ridges and acres of solar panels sprinkled around. For the first half of the day it didn't seem like there were any houses or tractors or farm equipment associated with the fields (where do the people live who do all this work?) and then when we got closer to Madrid there were small farms with houses and trees around them.  And the olive trees kept on coming.  

De rigeur picture of picnic table.

We stopped at a supermarket on Ocano and bought lunch and then we stopped at a rest area and had a picnic, always my favorite.  Bread and cheese, hummus, lettuce, yogurt, orange, a sweet coffee and milk drink -- all for about 12 euros total.  

While the boys napped and I drove I began to notice that the olive trees were endless.  For over an hour, at 120 km/hour, there were olives growing all the way to the horizon, up the hills and over the plains. When Benjamin and Jon woke up, we talked about the incredible number of olives and of course Benj did some research since we couldn't even begin to describe the quantity. He read that there are 300 million olive trees on 5 million acres in Spain and most of them are right in the region we were crossing through.  In 2012, an especially good year, Spain produced almost half of the world's entire olive oil crop.  Italy came in second with 25%, Greece was third with 20%.    In recent years there has been a bad pest that has damaged the crops in Europe and Tunisia has stepped up production.  But still Spain ends up pressing most of the olive oil, and Italy ends up blending and packaging the most.  Or so says the google.

Very hard to relay how the olive trees go on as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, we were hurtling down toward the coast, traveling about the same distance as between DC and Boston -- but so much easier driving and so much more beautiful.  It was hazy, which was too bad, because we couldn't see the Sierra Nevada mountains clearly.

Finally we got to the east-west road that would take us to our destination, Frigiliana, about 6 km inland from the coast.  We went east instead of west for a while, which made Jon fret, but we saw acres and acres of some mysterious crop that was shrouded in a tight cover.  We have to find out what is inside those plastic structures   wrapped up so snugly. It can't be olives, unless the fly is particularly terrible near the coast.  

We arrived at our lovely apartment which we have rented for a whole week -- a friend of our neighbors owns this place.  The back balcony overlooks a deep chasm in the mountains, and way down the hill we can see the Mediterranean.  The town is perched on a steep hillside, rows of white houses along curvy narrow roads, all very tippy.  After we got ourselves settled in, had some tea, read the guide book about local points of interest, we decided it was time to go out in search of dinner.  We have been trained to think that dinner is not until 9:00 at the earliest but when we walked around, almost everything was dark and closed.  After about two blocks we decided we were not that hungry anyway and we would go home and make dinner from the leftover groceries plus things that were nicely left in the pantry.  It was still a mulit-course dinner with salad, soup, bread and cheese, a fried egg, an after dinner hot drink and chocolate.  We know how to camp.

Jon found a lizard from Muskitz hiding in our dirty clothes and Benjamin caught it for us, then tortured me with it before letting it go outside.  Poor lizard has been moved to an entirely alien climate. 

Benjamin is with us for two more days so he gets to choose what we do until he leaves.  We can be lazy after he goes.