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Published: December 12th 2017
Sleep for Steve; she was no so good. It’s like there was caffeine in our vegan carrot cake or something. Plus the bed has one of those mattresses that registers every tiny move your partner makes at about 4.2 on the Richter. But Tarifa has no patience for the underslept and we have a bus to catch. Our room has an espresso maker… named Maria! Get it? Is this blog on? Seriously, though, we slam some espresso and split.
The walk to the bus station is about twenty-minutes past parts of the city we haven’t seen yet, which is great. We pass a little park that features a fair with rides. We consider taking our baggage on the Ferris wheel since they seem to enjoy carousels so much, but… the bus. At the station we grab a couple of those potato/eggs tart slice and more coffee, maybe from a real Maria, we didn’t ask. The bus ride is, once again, a non-event and we are deposited in Tarifa. We are now at the very bottom of Europe, which one would assume would smell much worse than it does. This is the city from which we will depart by ferry for
holiday dress
More legs! It must be a holiday because many ladies are out wearing their finest.Morocco. One great thing about this trip so far has been convenience. The buses, long distance and local, have been so great we’ve yet to get in a cab.
We find our place, Hostal Tarifa on the main drag through town and think, yick; Tarifa is just some town. But a little exploring drops us into the old city, which is right up there with the other old parts of the cities we’ve seen. We are way off season here, as the town is largely built on kite surfing and Morocco departures, so it’s far from crowded. It’s not empty, though, as we’ve seen dozens of kite borders out on the sea and roaming around town with a look that says, “Gee, your hair smells like de-fish-ous.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah; we’re hungry again. So, we will kill two birds with one stone; get our laundry started at the Lavenderia, and seek out some tapas. We find some awesome stuff in a little place playing American music. Wait, do you hear the digression theme music?
ALL of the music we are hearing on this trip, notwithstanding a song or two, is American. Our rock, oldies, jazz, hip hop,
easy listening (little too much of that…) is American and it’s all they play! What’s really strange is most people speak very little if any English, which means they don’t know what the lyrics are saying. But we own the music in this country. There hasn’t been much fodder for patriotism lately, so we’ll take what we can.
With our bellies satiated for the moment and our clothes clean (for the moment), we set about sussing out our arrival in Tangier. Here’s the long and the short of it; it’s confusing! We learn all we can, but we still feel a little confused and we don’t want to arrive confused because confusion is to the tout as the monkey is to the organ grinder; a livelihood! So, we have decided to spend one more night in Tarifa, find more tapas (yes, this means more‘pus… or calamari or cuttlefish – we are doing our best to rid the world of cephalopods) and we'll talk to a local travel agent tomorrow. It will also give us a day to rest up before the country change. We’re really spent right now, so if you don’t mind, turn off the lights on your
way out.
December 10th
So it's December 10th and we visit the travel agent only to learn they can't really book our Morocco bus tickets so we just purchase the 9am ferry tickets and make today a vacation day from our vacation. We catch up on blogs and work, find another great restaurant for dinner, buy a bottle of wine to take with us to Morocco and set our clocks for a 7am wake up.
December 11th
Well, it's December 11th now and the wind is howling and it's raining hard. We pack up, eat a quick breakfast and taxi to the port because this is no kind of weather for walking, only to find out the port is closed for the morning and maybe the day. Back in a taxi, back to our same room and will likely wait it out another day here and hope for suitable weather for our channel crossing tomorrow. They may resume trips today, but need to be on Tangier to meet a 12:15 bus.
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Stephen Marks
non-member comment
Awesome trip
We are doing a deep dive on your blogs (I read while MM listens) and we're loving the journey. Just getting out of Spain now. Sorry we haven't been following up until now but things have been a bit crazy and frankly, the blogs aren't sent to us so we had to ask Rene where they were and she sent us a link today on Xmas. Snow here is really shitty so we're going go come home a couple of days early and hope to spend New Year's eve with you and get even more of a download...but we will be very caught up by then.:)