Blogs from Gibraltar, Europe - page 7

We stayed over in Benalmadena in Spain at the Benalmadena Palace hotel. Great hotel, location is somewhat far out of the resort. By saying this, we found Benalmadena to be such an uninteresting place compared with other resorts in the Med, its is difficult to understand why so many Brits venture there. The town is spread out across a large area which makes browsing around difficult. If you're after shopping and browsing around the shops, don't bother visiting Benalmadena. The whole area including Torremolinos and Fuengirola seems to be stuck in the 1970's with very few decent restaurants, unlike those found around Greece, Turkey and other European countries we could mention. Food standards seem to be much lower than of that found in The Canary islands. On a positive note, we rented a car via Marbesol ... read more

Finally! My pilgrimage happened. Ever since hearing about Gibraltar from two fellow travelers while on my trip with Erik back in ’08, I have wanted to go see the monkeys. “Perhaps they will jump on me and wrestle MY muffin away from me,” I mused, recalling a story one of the girls had told. Jump on me they did, but I wasn’t brave enough to carry food around, so that did not become an issue. We did witness several food stealings, though, which were quite humorous. But what am I talking about?! Monkeys? Muffins? Gibra-what! Allow me to explain. Gibraltar is not in Spain, but neither is it its own country. It is, according to Wikipedia, a self-governing British overseas territory, which of course means that the language of the Anglos is spoken there. We had ... read more

Madrid Algiciras gibralterSUMMATRY FOR TRAVEL BLOG Madrid was a quick stop of about 5 hours befor I had to get my train, which was on the other side of town and made for a good excuse to tour through the big sights. I saw the big ones and I was not blown away, much of the sights seemed to be under construction. I did see some cool identical towers that reminded me of V for Vendeta. I tried some freaking great paistries in a shop near a government office where I got in trouble for taking a picture. Then I was off to the south. The train ride to Algociras was the best part of Algiciras. It was a slummy port city and I was not impressed.  The next day I went to Gibraltar! This was ... read more

This is a day behind so forgive. Tuesday is my birthday and we are going to see the Rock of Gibraltar. Out our deck we see lots of ships in the bay and we can see Aljazeera, Spain. Gibraltar is on the other side of the ship. After we got dressed we stepped out on the deck and found a huge oil tanker RIGHT alongside us. It was going to refuel us with thousands of gallons of marine diesel fuel. As we left the ship at 9:30 AM, they had just started refueling. When we left the cabin there were 3 balloons with Happy Birthday on them glued to the side of our door and a birthday card from Princess Cruises. Nice things for the price of this cruise - just kidding. We took a minibus ... read more

Just don´t go there! Its the first wrong recommendation Ive found in the Lonely planet guide. The hotel is really a rooming house. Our room was right over the reception-bar area where the tv sits up high against the floor boards so in our room we listened to the TV show until 12am at loud volume. Since there is an open middle corridor the sounds bang off the walls and you can hear people sneeze. Thats not that bad but next door was a woman with a toddler and a baby. At 4 am the baby started crying and didn´t stop until 8 am. I even knocked on the door because a screaming .. and I mean full volume infant screaming should wake up the adult in the room right? Either the 'adult' wasn´t in the ... read more