Day 140: Adios Madrid — Hola Andalucia!
We caught an 11:30 am flight (#36 of the year) to Malaga without incident. We loved seeing all the family-friendly airport lines at the Madrid airport. Hadn’t seen that stuff since South America.
This week we’ve rented a house in Mijas, which is about 40 minutes from Malaga. We’ll be joined (tomorrow) by Teddy’s sister Claire, her husband Harlow and two of their three children, Crosby and Grace (baby Teddy is staying home with Lobsy).
They’re flying in from DC (DC to JFK — JFK direct to Malaga!). Here they are in DC en route to the airport:
We’ll also be joined for a few days by our good NYC friends the Peuns — Chris, Rachel and two-year-old Oscar.
We grabbed our rental car and, with some time to kill before we could check in to the house, set out in search of 1) lunch and 2) groceries.
We made it to the town of Mijas Pueblo, which is a totally charming little white-washed village with flower boxes and cobblestoned streets — and tons and tons of tacky Brits on holiday (is that bad to say?).
At one point we followed Google Maps deeper and deeper into the center of town until we found ourselves lodged at the very end of a total dead end on a teeeeeensy narrow street…with a bunch of impatient drivers behind us. Somehow Teddy navigated our minivan backward out of the clusterf*ck and we fled to more open areas.
Lunch was quick, and after two grocery stores, a liquor store and a pharmacy (cough medicine for me, who’s finally succumbed to this nasty cold), we made our way to the house.
Torre Redondo is a vacation house with a pool overlooking a beautiful hilly landscape and, in the distance, the Mediterranean (aka the “ter-AY-bium” as James referred to it).
It’s got a pool, lovely gardens, plenty of common areas for hanging, entertaining, eating, and enough bedrooms for all of us.
It’s charmless, but sometimes the cheesy new houses are the ones that work best for groups — big open kitchen, plenty of glassware, dishwasher, grill, etc. We are pleased.
We broke out the 1000-piece puzzle I bought in Madrid, ate dinner and went to bed — eagerly anticipating the family and friends en route!!
