The second weekend of September we went to Granada, Spain- which is about 3 hours away. I wasn't exactly expecting a whole lot since I'm not a big city person but it was actually pretty cool! We stayed right downtown in this apartment complex that was part of a hotel group, which was nice! We walked everywhere from our hotel. Granada was so pretty...I loved the architecture everywhere in the older parts of the city and how quaint it was even though it was a big city. We spent a lot of time just walking around, following some "tourist path" in our travel book :) We hit some fun spots though and enjoyed our time there. The big thing to see there is the Alhambra, which is a cool fortress/palace up on one of the hills in Granada. We didn't go into the actual fortress area because they have a petty strict restriction on the number of people there at a time and you have to get tickets farther in advance than I checked. Plus I didn't really want to take the kiddos in there...it's a long tour! We instead took a tour of the garden area next to it, which was good enough for us and the kiddos :)
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| this was in the market area....it used to be where they sold silks, etc. but now it's all touristy stores but fun to walk around |
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| lots of Moroccan influence |
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| bakeries everywhere of course :) |
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| near a bridge/river that goes under the main street in Granada |
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| the Alhambra |
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| Carmen is having me work on my "selfies" :) :) :) |
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| pano view of the Alhambra from the neighboring hill at sunset! it was beautiful |
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| super cute streets in Granada |
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| The Generalife Gardens |
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| more flat fountains...just asking for little kids to go in :) |
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| more beautiful views... |
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| and beautiful details... |
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| Old Entrance to the Alhambra |
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| this poor girl was exhausted! it was so sad/cute |
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| of course more ice cream :) |
We stayed in Granada from Friday to Sunday but Saturday morning we took a bit of a drive to my family's ancestral town in Spain called Uleila del Campo, which was just shy of 2 hours away from Granada. The drive was beautiful though...lots of mountains and beautiful little towns tucked away on hills. We, along with some other family members, are trying to get some family history started on that side of the family so I knew when we moved to Spain we had to go there. We chose this weekend because we found online that they celebrated their town saint the second Saturday of September and we figured that would be a good time to go. It turned out not to be exactly the best...both the church and Townhall were closed so we weren't able to look up any records or talk to anyone there about where to find them. Also....the celebration was to last over multiple days and most of the events/activities for Saturday were later in the day or outside of town (bike race). So that was kind of a bummer...but it was still cool to go!
We were super lucky in finding a local (she grew up there and was visiting her mom for the festival) who knew English fairly well and was super friendly and nice enough to walk us around town and try to help us in figuring out a little bit of our family tree. She took us to the cemetery and, although there were still some misunderstandings in what we were trying to do, she tried to help us in the right direction of who we would be related to and wouldn't. The Spanish custom of using the mother and father's surname and the order they fall in are pretty darn important and imperative in getting the right person so that's something we have to work on finding :) So although we didn't get a whole lot accomplished it was still pretty awesome to go to the town and walk the area and get a start on the whole process. We'll definitely have to go back another time and find actual documents for our search!
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| on the drive to Uleila...it was a beautiful day! |
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| The beautiful little church in Uleila! |
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| I peaked in and got a shot of inside :) |
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| Carmen and our helpful tour guide :) :) :) |
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| it was so fun to walk around this quaint little town! |
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| I loved it :) :) :) |
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| This is how the Spanish do their cemeteries...kinda weird having it all above ground but it was kinda pretty in a way! |
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| we passed this roadside strip mall of ceramics on our way to Uleila and luckily had to get gas at this stop on the way home :) :) :) It was pretty cool...so many things to choose from! |
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| driving around Spain is so fun! It's amazing how a little town will pop up out of nowhere set on a hill...sometimes I'm like...why in the world would they have a town over there? I didn't get pics of some of them because we were driving but this one we drove around half of it so we got to see more of it..it was SO pretty! Set up on the hill with this beautiful church. SO Spain |
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