What a day! I mean that in both a good way and a bad way... Mostly good (since I'm writing this now back at our apartment at the beach, with a lovely glass of wine in hand 🙂)
It felt like this day trip was frustration after frustration, punctuated by amazing views and some not-so-insignificant satisfaction that we got through it!
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| Top of The Rock, with Spain in the background |
We left for Gibraltar this morning a bit after 10, and were back "home" by 7pm, just before dark.
Our day went like this:
*NO* wrong turns driving! ZERO! We parked at the border, bought our tickets, crossed the border, and caught the city bus to the cable car. Parking was easy, and the lot was not full at all.
I had a number of personal challenges today, and I will say that I passed them with flying colors!
First was the cable car (heights) - my "trust in the engineering" mantra gets me through a lot of situations!
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| Cable Car, just on the right |
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| Cable Car arriving |
Next were the lookouts and stairs
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| I didn't take these stairs |
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| Morocco in the distance |
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| The harbor |
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| Spain on the right, Morocco across |
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| Top lookout station |
And then the Skywalk - It's a glass walkway that goes around and past the cliff, far above the beach below. I *looked* at the far corner of the Skywalk 😉.
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| Rick went all the way around... |
From there, Rick went up the stairs to the next peak
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| Do you *see* where people are walking?!? |
While I took the easy route
And saw some monkeys
The hard part was that we didn't know where Rick's walk would come out. We both thought it would just be a short climb up to the peak, then he'd come back down, and we'd continue. But it didn't work out that way 😔. He couldn't come back down, so continued on, while I tried to find where he would come out. Multiple phone calls later (really poor reception, and *really* poor map), a very kind woman walked with him to find the road I was on. Phew!
The last of my challenges was the Cave (claustrophobia) - I had intended to just go "far enough" then turn around and go back the way I came in (yes, that would be ok). But! It worked out fine! No twinges or anything 🙂.
Here's some of the cavern before the light show
And during the light show (they projected different colors onto the formations)
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| The Angel |
After all that, we found out that (1) we couldn't take the cable car from the mid-point, and (2) the alternate route back up was closed. So we had to retrace our path to the top (we had walked down a significant amount). Once we discovered that, we decided to skip the suspension bridge that was even farther down.
We were *plagued* with wrong turns! I guess the good luck we had driving made up for itself in walking...
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This drive was much simpler than it sounds on Google Maps 🙄. Basically, get on A-7 towards Cádiz, then turn off at CA-34 towards Gibraltar.
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We paid a bit more for the cable car and nature reserve tickets at the kiosk than we would have at the entrance, and we didn't use the "free" shuttle included. My research killed me! Many people said the shuttle took forever, so I knew to look for the city bus without waiting very long- no wasted day trip time. But, I couldn't find anywhere online that talked about buying tickets on site - could you do it? (Yes) How much would it be? (34£). Anyway, we did the sure thing and bought our tickets at the kiosk, in euros. I still have no clue what the shuttle bus looks like, or where one would catch it. The city bus drivers were all charming and helpful.
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We stopped for lunch at the restaurant at the top. Early in my research, I had thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to have a walking lunch (sandwiches, etc). But then I completely forgot about that 🙄. The way my luck was running though, if we had done that, the monkeys would have attacked...
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We tried for Gibraltar a while ago, but when we arrived, we found out that the nature reserve was closed for the weekend for maintenance. We already knew that the cable car was going to be offline for the following week (why they gave that information online, but not the other is beyond me!). Well, it was only an hour's drive, so we left without crossing the border.
To note: the parking lot had plenty of space, and the line of cars to cross was long and slow.
Here's as close as we got (notice the clouds? I think we made out a bit by having to wait!)
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UPDATE:
I had a devil of a time getting to sleep! I kept jolting awake from walking a narrow path on a precipice!
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