Rock of Gibraltar

Woo! First stop of the cruise

…

We preordered our food the night before to be brought up to our room in the morning. Gates open at 7 am for the overachievers to start going onshore. We’re doing this one on our own, so we can go whenever. The main site is the Rock of Gibraltar. Look at it on the map above, and you’ll see its strategical and geographical importance. Although at the tip of Spain, it is now a British overseas territory. The town food is a mixture of tapas and fish & chips.

We walked off the cruise ship and instantly got accosted by taxi drivers who reminded us how long and excruciating it would be to get to city center. Then later it was how long it would be to the top of the rock. We talked to the information dude at the port who told us it was 2.5 km to the cable car.

We said no thanks to those taxi sales people and walked to the city center, where we made a right turn and walked through a wonderfully touristy walk-street to the base of the cable car with a supermarket sandwich in hand.

It was a flat and easy walk.

Bummer #1 is that it turns out today (Monday) is a bank holiday, which means that most of the stores are closed, so no knickknacks. The only type of places open today are food and drink related.

We left the hard work to the funicular.

At the top you could see across the sea to Morocco, home of no homelessness. lol

Up at the top of the cable car ride, we learned that we should have 1) purchased a combination ticket or 2) went through an unmarked gate (my choice) and taken a trail to get to the road that leads to the park reserve/WWII tunnels that we wanted to visit. You can see it right there, a path tread by many others, well at least a couple.

Anyway at that point we got the feeling that the system was trying to take advantage of us. Since no one else felt like doing questionable activities, we decided to call it a day. I however, am always up for jumping low fences, literally and figuratively. It’s in my blood. Plus in this case it was an open gate.

Hungry and a bit exasperated on our options, I opened my bag of chips… aka monkey bait.

… and this guy showed up out of nowhere and made eye contact with me. The dude in the background wasn’t there a second ago. “Monkey see, monkey do.”

I scolded him (the monkey, not the man) while at the same time hoping I wouldn’t get attacked and end up needing a rabies shot. Guy was a troublemaker. Immediately after my interaction with him, he skittered over to try to open up some lady’s purse that was hanging off the back of a stroller. Another case for evolution over religion.

So we went back down and hung out at the botanical garden where me and Hud sketched for a bit.

We also visited the Trafalgar cemetery. “We” being just me. It was small, and the only reason I went in was because it happened to be along the way. It wasn’t much to look at and not many from the battle of Trafalgar were there.

On the walk back to town, we happened to meet up with Joette and Ris before boarding and the sailaway party.