Day 4 wrapped up our time in Seville with dinner and a show, minus the dinner.

Day 5

Another day, another loading of giant, increasingly ungainly suitcases, and now, we’re schlepping bags of groceries with us. Today’s destination: Granada!

Those of you over a certain age probably have the Allen Sherman novelty song cuing up in your head after reading that city’s name. I know I did, and it took real effort to tamp down the urge to sing it aloud from memory, a feat that would be incredibly impressive to the other fifty- and sixty-something year olds on the bus, were the song not so cloyingly annoying. We don’t get a lot of novelty tunes anymore, Weird Al notwithstanding, as he has transcended that narrow lane and gone fully mainstream. Also: Do not sing “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” to the Spanish. They not only don’t get the reference, but they will give you the stink eye. Granada is not a city to mock, even in jest. They are fiercely proud of it, especially the Granadians. Granada is to the rest of Spain as Texas is to the rest of the United States; proud to a fault, but not without good historical reason.

ANYWAY…

Breakfast found us having to strategically decide our meal planning again, owing to the long day and late dinner. The bread from yesterday’s emergency pre-dinner sandwiches was all gone, and we were worried as a group how we were going to best utilize the rest of our groceries, which included lunchmeat, peanut butter, honey, mayonnaise, and two different kinds of chips. As we sat in the dining room, eating our European breakfast, enjoying the seventy-nine varieties of Special Ham and eating delicious marmalade on toast, we all had the same idea at once.

With Lalo Schifrin’s theme from “Mission: Impossible” playing in my head, we formed an impromptu crew and hatched a daring caper on the fly. Our target was the stack of untoasted white bread on the buffet, with secondary objectives being the pre-packaged condiments, napkins, and, if we could manage it, more ham, because, you know, when in Spain…

NOTE: I didn’t really need to link to the Mission: Impossible theme, did I? But for those of you who still have “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” stuck in your head, this should clear it out. You’re welcome.

Now, I’m glancing about, watching the hotel staff for them to look the other way so my wife can stuff a double handful of pilfered bread into our traveling bag, and a sobering thought occurred to me. I tried for both of my trips to Europe to identify the Ugly Americans. In Greece, it was easy. I spotted them on day one and they carried through to the end of the trip. I’ve got stories galore, let me tell you. But I noticed there weren’t any Ugly Americans on this trip, at least, not insofar as our initial group was concerned. Sure, the other groups were keeping to themselves, but they weren’t really being ugly about it. As I said to Janice, “Okay, go now, go, go, gogogogogo!” and watched her stow the ill-gotten bread, it hit me like a ton of bricks: It’s us. WE are the Ugly Americans. Stealing bread from a buffet? Who DOES that? And ham? What, in case there’s no ham at the place we’re going to next? Fat chance; the country is practically made out of ham. They stack it up to make their houses, like salty Lego’s. And yet, here we are, squirreling food away like Syrian refugees.

It took a while for me to regain my perspective on this situation. If we were the Ugly Americans, we were at least a lesser form of American embarrassment. It never spilled out into the streets, nor caused a public scene of any kind. On the next trip, it’ll be someone else’s turn to draw the heat for the rest of us.

These thoughts kept me entertained as we made our way to Alhambra, the fabled Moorish castle, a storied edifice, made famous by Washington Irving, among others. Alhambra! Yeah, okay, it was yet another castle, but this one was different. The Moorish architecture and styling was unlike anything I’d seen before, and it was still mostly intact and very accessible, once you got up the damn hill.

Our guide was Marta, and she was universally declared our favorite guide on the trip, hands down. You know when you tour these sites, they give you a receiver and earphones so that the guide can speak in a normal tone of voice and you hear them clearly. This was very necessary for us, as the place was crowded to bursting with large groups of people, mostly students from Italy, France and Spain, along with a decent amount of elderly Germans, all of whom were on holiday and touring the castle with varying degrees of interest.

This was not Marta’s first rodeo, and in between some lively commentary about the architecture of the castle and great interactive stories that really helped the kids understand just how different it was back then, she would drop these little asides into the mic: “I hate the students. They are the worst, you don’t even know.” Oh yes, we know, but it was really nice to have our irritation validated.

The groups of students would walk through the rooms of the castle, almost at a forced march, talking and shoving and hitting each other on the arm, and there was some adult with them, talking, but we couldn’t hear them and I’m certain they couldn’t either. They’d simply flow around us like stinky salmon, all jacked up on hormones and energy drinks, and it was always in the middle of something interesting we were hearing about. We were duly fascinated by the place. They could not have cared any less. “Just look at them,” Marta said as they streamed by, “do you think they gonna learn ANYTHING about this place? No!”

She tried to keep us ahead of the group. At one point, in one of the many courtyards, she looked up and said, “Uh oh, the enemy is here. Hurry, let’s go,” as the group came into the space from the opposite side.

Alhambra was my favorite place we visited. Finally, I got to see some stuff that mattered to me. Marta showed us where the wives and concubines slept, and then showed us the queen’s chamber with the alcove that was acoustically designed to let the queen listen to what the other wives and mistresses were saying about her. She showed us the escape tunnel where the king could bug out if the Christians breached the walls. Stuff like that. Cool castle stuff.

As the castle is located at the top of a smallish mountain, there were some stunning views of Granada. I was interested in the ruins of the living quarters, because you could really see how this place was its own self-contained fortress. I could have stayed there a little longer, but we had to get to our hotel to check in. There was some free time for the group, but I had other plans.

You see, I took my laptop with me on this trip (like an idiot) and my intention was to do some updating from the road, but a combination of tiredness and a lack of space in some of the hotels made this difficult. I’ve been writing my trip notes by hand, which isn’t anything new, but I was missing the ol’ clicketyclack of the keys, so I elected to stay behind and get a little writing done while everyone else went to the city center and shopped for a couple of hours.

That was my plan.

We got into our room and were baffled by our accommodations; there was a smaller bedroom off of the main bedroom, with two extra beds in it. Our room could sleep four. It was a weird and also terrible use of space. But there was at least a desk, with convenient plugs so I could power up. Cool.

Janice left me to my machinations. And that’s when I noticed it. See if you can spot what’s wrong here.

If you’re asking yourself how I’m going to get into that chair, you are bang on.

There was simply no way to access the desk, not without going full Keith Moon on the hotel room. I mean, I tried to move the bed, but it only shifted over a few inches. Ditto the desk itself, which might have been attached to wall in the back. The only person who could have sat in that desk chair was Janice’s niece, who is five feet tall and waifish—and even THEN, I know for a fact she would have had to climb up and over and lower herself down into the chair like it was the cockpit of an F-16.

At one point, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking into the room with two bonus beds, a closet, a safe, and a nightstand, and wondering why oh why, Granada Hotel, you had all of this space and decided to wedge the desk into the one part of the room that created a chokepoint.

My moving things around and using my brain to think was causing me to heat up, and the room’s temperature wasn’t helping. There was a thermostat, but no matter what you set it on, the numbers kept going up.

Well aware that I was currently playing the role of Ugly American, I ventured downstairs and took great pains to politely and apologetically explain what was going on in my room with the thermostat. I was told that’s just for heat, and this time of year, I was better off opening a window. Awesome. Sensational. Not for the first time in two separate European countries, I wondered to myself why they even bothered to put a little control unit in the room if it’s functionally useless. That’s a nail that could be holding hotel art on the wall. Sweet Baby Jesus.

Upstairs. Thermostat off. Window wide open. Outside compressor noises filling the room. I’m in my underwear, drinking agua con gas, trying to form a coherent thought, and attempting to navigate onto the 3G network via a stupid human trick that no one knew about. Janice returned and managed to get my blood pressure down. I decided to take a shower to cool off and unfunk myself from all of the walking and the sweating.

This bathroom…I wish I’d gotten a picture of it. There was a toilet and sink, and then a second, larger room, with a bidet (I never got the hang of it, and a shower). This big ass room, at first glance, looked like a sex-bathroom, right? It’s a shower in a giant open floorplan? Acrobatics commence!

Only, no. Once you turn the corner and look inside, you can see there’s a clear glass shower booth, walled off, into the corner of the room. Not the quarter, or the quadrant, but the corner. The clearance in this shower? Roughly equivalent to an American phone booth, circa 1975. I had to shower sideways, okay? I turned to the right, wet and soaped the left side of my body, and then shuffled to the left, and soaped and rinsed the right side of my body. I never faced the shower head. It was impossible.

Stepping out of the shower booth, I put my foot down on the marble slab that lined the whole room, and my foot shot out from under me, and all that kept me from describing a one and a half gainer onto my head was the fact that I was still half-inside the booth and was able to grab hold of the walls and railings. Scared the hell out of me. I adopted a wide stance, much like a sumo wrestler about to fight, and carefully shuffled across the black ice-slick bathroom floor, like the world’s worst hermit crab. When I finally emerged from the bathroom, all of the stress Janice had banished was back, living at the base of my skull. This hotel was trying to kill me. I understood now exactly what happened to Jack Torrance.

Janice took a shower, but only after I laid spare towels down on the floor and in the shower stall. It was strictly for friction so that she could stand on the floor without skiing across it.

The rest of the night was a blur. We ate from an expansive hotel buffet that thankfully included paella, and then I took my happy ass to the bar and did my writing there, like a true poseur, drinking wine and ignoring the football match on the big screen.

Up next, Day 6!