Our stay here has been great – it’s kind of sad to leave. But a whirlwind of stops await us. We have 3 stays of 3 nights each lined up, followed by a longer stay of 10 days.
Today we’re off to Ronda, a 1.75 hour bus ride to the NE. A typical white village hill town, it promises some dramatic scenery.
The Airbnb listing of our ‘home’ . Laura
Miscellaneous images of the area – Laura
As promised, we sampled the churros and hot chocolate. They were airier than expected, but firmer that our (U.S.) puffy raised donuts. Hot out of the fryer, easy to see why they’re popular.
Some restaurants advertise them –
Their cheesecake, on the other hand, is airier than our typically dense cake. Still very tasty, with a unique presentation on a slate tile
Dave & I are notoriously slow to make friends, but he seemed to have no problem here. They welcomed him with open arms. He kept a hand on his wallet, not knowing if their friendship gestures were genuine.
These are the temptations that call out from the streets of Southern Spain. For the most part we’ve resisted. – Laura
Tacoma has America’s Car Museum, and I’d bet one could make an adventure out of visiting car museums all over the world. They’re tucked away in odd places – like Malaga and Nashville. The following verbiage has been stolen (by me!) from several websites.
“The car museum, which opened in 2010, contains more than 100 cars. The owner is Portuguese collector Joao Magalhaes, and the fully restored models range from years 1898 to 2011 . Housed in the city’s historic tobacco factory building, they include Hispano Suiza, Rolls Royce, Mercedes Benz, Bentley, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Bugatti, Porsche, and Ferrari, and an extensive collection of antique and rare cars. The museum also features a unique display of engines converted to art. Finally, there are over 300 original hats by great designers such as Dior, Chanel and Balenciaga among others.”
In addition to this awesome hat collection (I’ll do a separate post for them), the museum displayed many cars with a dress or coat and hat of the same vintage. They made some beautiful pairings.
At the museum’s website, select the British flag in the top right hand to get a little English translation, and poke around the site to get some great images. The last selection under the “Museum” tab is a “Virtual Tour’, which will take you through the museum using the same technology as Google Earth – street view. This Virtual Tour does not include the fashion pairing I mentioned above.
The only bad thing about the abundance of windows in the building is that it resulted in backlighting – bad for photo taking. Below are some of my better shots with details when I remembered to take them. Enjoy! Laura
Two of the “art’ engines on display.
I have a friend in Tacoma who is building a motorcycle with the intent to break a speed record this year in the Utah salt flats. His name is Mike and here is a link to a blog that chronicles his efforts. He even gave me a little shout out for helping with some curve coordinates. Mike built a bike to race last year but weather prevented ever running it on the flats. Mike has been doing a phenomenal job all after work and weekends and I applaud his efforts. I wanted to provide more significant help but the timing of this trip precluded me adding any value. Never-the-less the idea got me interested in learning more about how to use my computer aided design application Rhino (a very popular CAD package from Robert McNeel & Associates headquartered in Seattle). I spent some time leaning how to create airfoil sections curves and surfaces. The example above is the result of some of those experiments. Next I wanted to figure out if I can analyze the aerodynamics of a bike. Aero analysis is performed with CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software. Most of the good CFD software costs $10K or more. I found a fairly good free (open source) application called OpenFOAM and a second application for viewing the results called ParaView. I am continually amazed at the amount of free quality software that is out there. CFD analysis is fairly complex and software to perform it complex as well. Luckily OpenFOAM comes with a bunch of test cases one of which happened to be a motorcycle. Even with the support of having a ready made test case it still took me 20 to 30 hours to get to the point of being able to produce the image above. The colors represent air pressure, red being high pressure and blue being low pressure. The squiggly lines represent how air would flow. My next experiment will be to take my draft motorcycle above (second picture), add a driver, and perform the same aero analysis you see in picture three. I hope at some point I can take the real shapes of Mike’s motorcycle and run it through this software to see the results. Since I have only scratched the surface of leaning how to use the software, I have a bit of work ahead of me. Luckily there are lots of good tutorials out there and there is a complete course from MIT on aerodynamics that I have been viewing as well. My major is Electrical Engineering (not aero) so all of this is new to me. Now you know what occupies my time for 9:00 till midnight. (Loren – this is why a lug a computer around). -Dave
We actually took a tour! A one day bus excursion to Granada (about 150 km to the NE) to visit the Alhambra Palace. I would love to tell you details about it, but our tour guide’s microphone didn’t work… we heard few details. But, it is beautiful, and has a fascinating history – from what I’ve read. The Moors took over 2 centuries (1238-1492) to build it, and they were eventually booted by the Christians. I regret not reading up on it before the tour, but now have another topic on my reading list.
The bus ride revealed olive trees for as far as the eye could see. Did you know Spain is the number one producer of olives in the world? Producing more than double that of the #2 country – Italy. Most of Spain’s olive oil is exported to Italy, and any olive can be made into olive oil. It only has to be allowed to ripen to a black color. Yup – the microphone of the tour guide on the bus DID work 🙂
Photos of Alhambra Palace – the exterior one is not mine. There is skiing in the mountains in the background.
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– Laura
Yes, I will be adding a new file folder of museum brochures and city maps to my ‘travel’ box at home. I don’t revisit them often, but it’s always like Christmas when I do, as I’ve forgotten most of the excursions.
The Tourist Information offices so far have been most helpful in providing maps which also highlight local sights and attractions. Fuengirola’s office has free WIFI as well as a couple of gratis computers. They produced the map below when I asked about hiking trails – the trails we’ve been exploring. Not all of their advice was spot on, though: they recommended the train, not the bus, to Malaga, for a quicker, more pleasant ride. We found the bus was more comfortable, faster (way fewer stops), more scenic, and cheaper. Laura
This will be a catch-all for random observations around Fuengirola.
We’re 3/4 of the way through our visit here, and even though it’s a very built up area from Fuengirola to Malaga, I’d stay in the area again. With the exception of the direct beach area, it retains a local feel.
We’re off to the Automobile Museum in Malaga, which should provide some great photo opportunities. Be well – Laura
Nothing but blue skies here so we’re off to another visit to Mijas and surrounds.
In Mijas:
Our hike: We chose some different trails in same area. Dave noted these are some of the best hikes he’s been on – a combination of awesome scenery, a variety of terrain, and a little bit of a climbing challenge. We’d see 2-4 other hikers on the trail.
Sorry I’m always showing you his backside! We were pretty warm with the sun out, and were happy to see some light clouds come in.
Looks like Michigan to me! The pine is similar to jack pine.
Dave spotted the Rock of Gibraltar in the distant haze – center of the photo.
The trail crossed a road I would guess was for the Forest Service equivalent. Right about here we caught some staggering wind from the north coming through a break in the hills.
We finished our hike quicker than expected, so decided to walk back to Fuengirola instead of taking the local bus. Couldn’t have done it without Google maps, which took us on some true farm trails that we would not have found before we hit the outlying neighborhoods where street choices were more obvious. It added 9.3 km to the hike , for a total time of 5 hours. We earned our happy hour!
The above photo is looking back at Mijas. Look closely and you can see that Forest Road about 2/3rds of the way up the hill, running pretty horizontal. We hiked well above it. My guess is we weren’t quite halfway home when I took this photo. Aurg – I had a sore knee the next day for all of the downhill. Laura
We’ve seen a lot of men (all ages) wearing colorful slacks – in this case jeans. All colors – blues, greens, mustards, reds. A sign of what’s in store this spring??
The ladies seem to be going for bold-print tights. –
