The Traveler's Prayer



Near the Tarifa town walls

 Kathleen spotted this resolution as we walked around the very old town walls of Tarifa, Spain, the southernmost point in western Europe, being just north of 36 degrees latitude (the same latitude as Nashville TN, Grand Canyon Village on the south rim, and Kettleman City CA, for all you I-5 junkies). Actually we did not have to repeat this mantra very often, driving independently around southern Spain proved to be, for the most part, quite easy and even relaxing. We were armed with a good atlas (1:300K), and also Hertz's 'NeverLost' (ha). The problem, of course, in the small towns is that it is difficult to find street signs, even on foot, much less while driving, there is rarely anywhere even to pull over safely or legally, and the pronunciation of neither "Jill", the american voice on our navigation, or "Emily", the English one, was easy to comprehend. We settled on Emily, because we were laughing too much listening to Jill mangle Spanish. (I know, I know, we should have kept with the Spanish voice, but that presented its own problems, and wasn't as entertaining). Emily was pretty good, and less obtrusive than Jill, but had a way of stretching out the road names to comical lengths, eg., Andalucia became "Ahhhn  dahhhh louuuuu  teeeee  ahhhhhhhhhhhh". And, naturally, these towns laid out a millenium ago were not about square corners. The castillo was first, built on the high or strategic point, and the roads nuzzled around this point as tightly as possible. Many are so narrow, that I am sure that there was less than an inch on either side of our Ford Focus, which does not look so large in the American landscape, but is just a bit too wide in Spain. It had a lot of room, and could take nearly all our luggage in the enclosed back section, and gave us good mileage. It had terrible traction, however, and off-road driving was more momentous than necessary. One near 'cracking' point was driving out of Tarifa, we had to go up a steep cobblestone street and start from a stopped position at the top. I could not get enough traction to make it up in a safe manner, so had to back down the hill, and go out of town from a different route. The other near cracking point was in a dastardly parking garage in Granada, where I lost all of my normally quite confident and skilled driving ability, and had to give the attendent 5 euros to do my maneuvering for me.  I was so proud to return that car with only the scratches on it that I started with (obviously the result of scraping parking garage white pillars!).
Mostly, though, the roads were good, the weather pleasurable, the people friendly, and the scenery excellent. No matter how very small the village, there would always be an open bar, which would serve a uniformly great cafe con leche for a euro. Giles Tremlett, in his wonderful book Ghosts of Spain, says that Spain has more than 138,000 bars, more than the rest of western Europe combined! These are frequently good for breakfast, lunch, and tapas dinners. There is always a cigarette smoke issue, either barely tolerable or impossible to live with. Apparently the laws are changing there as well, but it is hard to believe that such an entrenched habit could be realistically curtailed quickly.