12. Hand in hand through their Park Life

Trip Start Jun 17, ????
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15
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of Spain and Canary Islands  ,
Tuesday, February 2, 1999

We were a long way south for skiing and it turned out to be a mild year with mushy lower slopes when we pitched up at Sierra Nevada.  All was well higher up though and there were some good runs back down to the resort.  It was a bit crowded though and sometomes I did have trouble relocating Mr Monksan at the bottom of the piste.
We took a day out of skiing to visit Granada.  I'm so glad that we did as it was a great place.  I particularly enjoyed Alhambra Palace - I think that this was the place where Queen Isabella sent Colombus off on his mission of discovery.  Marvellous.
We returned to Spain in 2002 for a trip to Barcelona.  I love surrealism, so I had a great time at the museums.  I saw of lot of Joan Miro and of course, the wonderful Park Guell created by Gaudi.  There is a fabulous staircase with a lizard type thing at the bottom and people were posing by it in turn.  One woman asked for everyone to just leave it empty for her 30 seconds because she wanted a picture of it alone.  I was quite keen to get it unaccompanie too - you don't always want someone gurning at the camera in front of famous monumnets and the like.  So everyone stepped aside briefly except this one woman who shoved her ugly child in the shot.  When the woman who wanted a person-free shot protested the mother said "Why don't you buy a postcard".  How thick can you get?  An how selfish.  After she'd gone it took no longer to photograph it with no-one there than if yet another person had joined the parade and stood in front.
We also took a bus out to the building site of La Sagrada Famille.  What a fantastic building - I just love it.  Shame they've squandered all that fab architecture on a church, but it'll still be a great day if they ever finish it.  I recorded a lot of it, but sadly this was lost when some tea-leaf made off with my camcorder in one of the parks.  I never even saw him/her but we did have to waste a lot of tedious time reporting it to the police so that we could claim on the insurance.  My credit cards and safe key were also in the bag - the hotel staff were really nice, letting me call and cancel the cards from reception and not charging to replace the safe key - they even waived the safe hire charge.  There was a lot of pick pocketing in La Ramblas, but sadly this kind of thing can happen anywhere, so I don't hold it against Barcelona.
We spent our last morning strolling along the beach front all the way to the Olympic village.  If we end up with anything half so nice after the London Olympics I will be amazed...
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