The Initial Incident Through to the First Day

This story begins, as with all the best ones, with a mistake. I had been wanting to go back to Spain to practice my Spanish after having spent a bit of time there by myself the year previous, but didn't want to go by myself whilst also not knowing where I wanted to go; just somewhere in Spain. This was the first issue, without knowing where to go I asked a few Spanish friends to get their recommendations and through this I heard Granada mentioned to me at each pass. Due to the praise I'd heard, I decided why not? What's the worse that could happen? As such, I asked a friend to come over so we could look into everything and this is where it all went wrong; like me, he just wanted to go on a holiday in general and wasn't too fussed about where BUT one stipulation is that he wanted to do the booking himself through mine and his discussion about what we could do and what would suit both our interests. I decided "You know what? I want to be in charge of booking the trip, I'm sure it won't be too bad" and thus I took the reigns, we talked and after much discussion on what we would do whilst in Granada, we found a hotel with good reviews, a price to match and next to a beach, it sounded perfect! It wasn't. There was one small snag with the hotel we chose to book; it wasn't in the city of Granada (which is where we wanted to go) but instead the province, which is a bit of an oversight on my part. Neither of us realised this until around a month before the flight and we had to hastily make some plans and extra bookings as a result, demonstrating the effect that stress has on a relationship; not the best.

The day arrives and neither of us are sure of what's to come; all we knew was that we were going to spend over an hour in a taxi heading down through Spain to the coast, which was surrounded by mountains. An extra snag, though deliberate one, was the time of our flight. It was 6AM. My friend was extremely adamant that we HAD to be at the airport at least 3 hours before the flight. Nothing is open at 3AM, and that's not even mentioning the debacle we faced in regards to parking at the airport nor our activities prior to leaving (which weren't sleeping nor relaxing). From arriving to the airport to getting to the hotel in Almuñecar, a long story short is as follows; from spending an hour doing nothing in the airport whilst sleep clouded our minds, through to two extra hours of doing nothing before we encountered our first problem with Ryan Air; lack of clear queue signage. Then there was the long 3 hours on a tight flight without the ability to sleep due to having Aisle seats. Once we got off the plane at Malaga Airport, we then had to see through the hoards of taxi drivers to find our own. The hour drive to the hotel felt like a lot longer as the lack of sleep and heat of Spain got to us whilst I tried to make small talk in Spanish to the driver. Once we arrived at the hotel, I instantly realised how small the town was as not even the receptionist spoke English; usually I'd be happy with this, but after no sleep, I wasn't the most thrilled. After a little stumbling, I managed to procure the keys to room, directions on how to get there and find out a little about the area. We then decided, for some reason, to climb the nine flights of stairs to our room with our suitcase and bags and by the time we got there - we were ready to collapse onto the beds. Looking around our room, we were impressed for the price: a fair size, decent balcony with a view, and a nice kitchen area. Setting our bags down, we realised that we wanted food and went for a walk.



The water glistened on a warm day as the promenade stretched out before us and the local sights settled in our vision and we said to each other; this might not be too bad after all, just need some food first and see where that takes us. Our slow walk took us through the charming old town of Almuñecar with winding brick streets and twisted alleys, onto a large open park filled with green. We settled upon a little tapas bar and enjoyed our meals immensely after not eating for a while. Walking seemed to be the word of the day as it's what we ended up spending our time doing with so much nature to see around the town. By the time we arrived back at the hotel, we decided to relax and play some games on the TV with my Switch before calling close on our first day.