Motril

There was no sadness packing up the car today and shutting up the house.  Rather, we were looking forward to be going out on the road again.
We are in Motril this evening.  The drive was long and we can't say beautiful, but it was very interesting.  Around Murcia, Spain, the landscape seemed to be entirely covered with plastic.  It was the strangest sight -  row after row after row after endless row of plastic covered greenhouses.  I tried to get some pictures as we drove but all of them were too blurry.  Sometimes, when looking at those greenhouses as the sun was shining on them, the plastic was so bright and shiny it looked like water.  And that's pretty much how the landscape was from about Murcia to close to Motril.  There are lots and lots of vegetables and fruit growing in this region!!!  We also saw huge fields of Chirimoya trees - Chirimoya being one of our favorite fruit to eat here.  So now we saw where the Chirimoyas that we would buy at the market probably came from.

We took a little detour to a place called Cabo de Gata.  It was very scenic.

We also got stuck in a pretty bad traffic jam along the way - they had completely closed one of the tunnels on the four lane highway so the two lanes in the other open tunnel were for traffic in both directions.  Which meant traffic on both sides had to go down to one lane.  Right before we got stuck in that, we had planned to stop for lunch in a town that we would be passing through.  But by the time we got out of that traffic jam, it was way past lunchtime so we decided to just go on and have an early dinner when we got to Motril.  By the time we found a hotel and a decent place to eat there, we were pretty tired!!!  But the hotel here in Motril is very very nice.  We stopped at a two star hotel, but before going into that two star one, we walked over to a four star hotel that looked like it was going to be WAY out of any reasonable price range.  But no, the price was so fair that we took the room in that fancy hotel.  And what was even better, they guy said he'd give us an upgraded room for the same price.  VERY nice room.  It had 3 rooms - bedroom, living room and bathroom and 3 balconies.  Here is the view from two of the balconies.

It was lovely to be in a nice, warm hotel.