Saturday afternoon before heading to Spain, my brother and I (along with 51,000 chanting Geordies and about 1,000 fairly quiet Derby fans) spent the afternoon watching the game. We popped in to a local bar for a swift pint beforehand and it was packed. I can’t understand anything they say when they get in a crowd. I reckon Newcastle played crap and were lucky to win, but my kid brother didn’t care how they played as long as they came away with the points lol. A great afternoon !l

Amanda took my Mum shopping for the afternoon in Newcastle (thanks Amanda) It was bloody freezing all day with a top of 1 degree………oops I broke 2 rules again (weather and swearing)!

We’ve both managed to board an Easyjet flight with a seriously bad cold…….well Amanda has, but I have a much more serious MAN FLU! Some extra baggage and two Trek hybrid bikes, which we bought from Alistair sight unseen, who was kind enough to drive them from Carlisle to my brothers in Newcastle and we are delighted with our purchase. He also delivered a couple of excellent bike boxes which I packed the bikes in and they arrived totally unmarked except a bent front axle, which I managed to straighten, in Malaga…so thanks mate !

 

Unfortunately my brand new High Sierra bag, snapped En route to Thailand and looked more like a broken old backpackers backpack which had travelled many many times round the globe……..note to self, don’t waste money on expensive suitcases! So I had to purchase a new suitcase in Newcastle.

 

6.30pm and we touched down in Malaga Airport and picked up our gear and took our hire car (a Fiat 500L)

which is a bit like a Suzuki Swift on steroids as our son Kee called it………..so I’m sitting on the wrong side of the car with a gear stick on my right, driving down the wrong side of the road, in the dark, with no Satnav or maps and cant see out the rear view mirror because its chockers! But don’t worry, I’ve got Amanda with me ha ha lol lol lol. So about 100k’s later, we took a 10k climb off the coast and upwards to a very windy, one way, cobbled laneway which literally had inches on each side of the car to play with.With no incidents worthy of reporting, we turned the key to our apartment in the beautiful Andalusian, whitewashed village of Frigiliana ( Amanda asked me to put that bit cause mine wasn’t descriptive enough) dropped all the gear and at 9.00pm we headed down the village 60 meters and had a lovely meal and bottle of local red plonk to wash it down.

Up nice and early for a snoop around the award winning village, which made its living over the past 800 years or so with producing sugar cane molasses, wine making and olive oil. The area was also extremely well known for its high quality silk. Apparently when the Moors conquered the area , they brought Mulberry trees, which support silk worms and the 3 top places for fine silk were here, Baghdad and            So it was in pretty good company. Seemingly the Muslims, Jews and Christians have all gotten on very well around here. Well until the 16th Century when the Christians got together, slaughtered the ruling Muslims and brought Catholicism back and it’s been like that ever since.

General Franco was pretty active down this way and there are lots of villages in the mountains which have been destroyed. Slowly since the 80’s the old inhabitants have been returning to some of them and have been “doing them up” We went to one called El Acebuchal yesterday, which is about 10kms from here on a really tight windy dirt road. I lost the front skirt of the car in one ditch………glad I took out full insurance …

We needed a mini shop so headed down to the nearest supermarket in Nerja and discovered the joys of Lidl, a great place to shop for beer and wine, oh and Amanda needed some stuff too. The wine is cheaper here than bottled water in Australia. So I had a little experiment (remember this Stu, Jef and Bruce ? To see what the cheapest palatable wine I could buy. I ended up with some Pinot Grigio for .99 euro cents per bottle…………result was a winner, very quafable and no sore head the next morning.

A quick trip around the town and a beer and Tapas before driving back up to our digs

Before heading back we drove around for walk and coffee in La Herradura Marina