Granada. March 2008

A stairwell. Transition. A few days between the cruise and Madrid. So far from the Gatwick airport. The early morning flight, the extra bags, seeing Cristin at the bus, lines, lugging, my nervousness at the airport, and we’re off.

Cristin at Gatwick:
Cristin waiting for the bus at Gatwick airport, in the dark, 5:30 in the morning, smiling, it was cold, she’ll be okay, and we left to get our flight. And she was okay. She got her flight, got home, she was happy to get home

A sigh. Another chunk ticked off. The cruise done. Now the next chunk. Going to Granada. The airport at Malaga, hot, long line. What next? The transfer solution. Megan and Vange asleep, a well-built highway through a sunny dry landscape, a very old but somehow stylish city, cobblestone streets, the Alambra, a very nice hotel. El Ladron del Agua. And we have a beautiful room in this hotel, at the very top, with a beautiful view of the Alambra above us.

Stairwell, and transition, because it was a step in between. Granada was planned because it wasn’t Madrid. We had wanted to see it because of the way Paul talked about it.  But it was a lot about helping Megan between Oxford and Madrid. Hair appointments. Laundry. It all worked. The hair guy, Pablo, stylish, trendy. The little old lady who did the laundry.

I took this picture from our hotel window, right after we arrived. We were tired, but what a room.

The room had a name, “Generalife,” not a number.

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Our_room_in_Granada_from_Alambra If you can see the outline in red, that’s our room at Hotel El Ladron de Agua, taken from one of the towers of the Alambra. You can imagine how beautiful it was.
We ate several times at El Azafan, with big windows looking out to a small park and up to the Alambra.

This is a picture of that restaurant, among other things, as Megan looked out from a balcony in the Alambra.

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LookingatSierraMadre True, the one day we went up to the Alambra together was cold, and clouds covered the views of the Sierra Nevada, but we were able to see it a bit, just below the clouds, at one point.
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Timmy Skiing at Bachelor

Noah took this on March 9, 2008. Timmy seems to have taken a big step up with his skiing the last few weeks. He went up to the summit at Bachelor a couple times last weekend — he calls it “the grown-up hiill” and skied down by himself. He’s skiing a lot of runs now, ending up tired and happy.

Click for the video

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGm_7cVg11Q]