”I Thought We Could Go Tomorrow” (Part 2)

Neither of us had slept well on our first night in our hotel in Carmona, the bed was hard and their were three thick layers of upper bedding, which felt heavy and claustrophobic, we ended up pushing the two top layers to the bottom of the bed. Then there were the noises, the first was an aggravating click-click coming from somewhere outside the room, it repeated every minute or so all through the night, other guests had no consideration, not speaking in hushed voices as they made their way to their rooms late at night, then banging their room doors shut, the room floors were tiled with no carpets, so above us we could hear the occupants scraping furniture on the floor. We wondered that If this is what it is like during the quieter Winter months, we hated to think what it would have been like in the height of Summer, but it is only when you are away from home that you notice these things, we certainly now appreciate the much more peaceful sanctuary of our own home, but at the end of the day we were only here for two nights 🤷‍♂️

We were also a little surprised that a 4* hotel like this did not provide tea/coffee making facilities in the room, but to be honest that is quite a common theme in a lot of hotels throughout Spain, so we had come prepared, with our own travel kettle and makings, so we could at least enjoy our leisurely morning coffee’s before finding a local cafe to enjoy breakfast. The hotel charged €18 each for a Continental Style breakfast, which is fine if you like a nice hearty all you can eat sort of breakfast, but it would have been a waste of money for Shazza or myself for the little she eats and me not being able to eat until much later. So we returned to the Central Square, one of the Cafe’s was bustling whilst the other’s looked virtually empty or were closed, we thought we had chosen wisely by selecting a table at one of the busier one’s which, from the conversations, sounded as if it was frequented by mainly Spanish people. However, we soon realised that although they may have been Spanish, they too were tourists visiting the area, the tell tale signs were the tourist maps they were studying over their breakfast’s. We ordered our usual, two coffee’s and two ‘Tostado’s’, we hadn’t had a Tostado for several weeks now, by choice, in fact, we have not had one since returning from our Galicia trip, so this would be nice. Well it had been, up until the point where we went to pay, for two coffees and two tostado’s, in our home town, we pay exactly €6, here they charged €11, which just went to prove that even ‘Rip Off Britain’ has equally competitive challengers for the title here in Spain 😲😲 Perhaps we should have remembered that the ‘Old Town’ was the tourist district 🤷‍♂️

We didn’t have a set plan for our last day’s activities, other than first making our way to the old ‘Fortress’ located near the ‘Parador’ luxury hotel, as it was located just outside the main tourist area of the Old Town, but no more than a fifteen minute walk from where we stopped for breakfast, after that, we would just adopt our usual strategy of wandering aimlessly through the maze of narrow cobbled streets until we came across somewhere of interest to stop and look around. What a waste of time that walk to the fortress ended up being, it was closed for the season to the general public, even those staying at the expensive ‘Parador’ luxury hotel, we would have been highly p****d off had we have paid to have stayed there, good decision Shazza, and I told her so. Not to be out done totally, we took a walk around the perimeter and were pleased that we hadn’t paid the entry fee, irrespective of what it may have cost, as it was just a ruin 🤷‍♂️

On our way back towards the ‘Old Town’ I kept chuntering on about what a waste of time that had been, Shazza agreed of course, but tried to pacify me by saying that at least we hadn’t wasted €200 staying at the ‘Parador’, that it was another lovely warm and sunny day for walking and, even in the middle of November here we were, still able to wear our short’s and tee-shirts. Wow ! that really did cheer me up, but only because it is rare for me to witness Shazza vocalising such an optimistic outlook 😂

So we started to just wander our way along lots of narrow cobbled pavements and roads, dwarfed by three and four storeys buildings, most of the houses were hidden behind big thick looking wooden doors, more like castle doors with large black bolts and ironwork running top to bottom on both sides, but with ornate brass door knockers. However, occasionally we did come across one’s that were open and we could see into the front porch area and into the ornately decorated, floor to ceiling, vibrant coloured tiled entrances, but beyond that, glazed inner doors concealed what lay within. There were narrow alleys that also ran between these slightly wider cobbled streets and, occasionally we would find streets lined with Orange Trees, some with steps leading up to other street levels and some with grand looking buildings, or churches, in fact this town has a lot of churches, a mosque, convents and monasteries. We had no specific plan, no sense of a general direction, just really to see as much of the town as we could before we got fed up, so we just wandered in whatever direction we pleased, occasionally we had to stand with our backs against the wall as a car squeezed past, a reminder that some of these cobbled roads were not just for pedestrians 😲

We came across a grand looking white-washed building, a security guard stood at the entrance smoking a cigarette, their were two or three people stood outside, separately, at various points, looking as if they were waiting for something, or someone, then we saw the big sign above the door identifying it as the ‘Ministry of Justice’, the local courthouse. Just behind it, a small white single story building, where we could hear a lot of chatter and the distinctive sounds of crockery emanating from it well before we got close enough to look inside, when we did we could see that it was a small canteen/cafe sort of affair, not one of the touristy sort of places, a bit more rough and ready, so we made the assumption, rightly or wrongly, that this was probably where people waited before reporting to have their case heard in the court 🤷‍♂️

Along one cobbled street we came across quite an ornate stone carved building, it looked a narrow building, but the tall doors were wide open, I took a glimpse inside the entrance and discovered that it was a history museum, I gave Shazza an enquiring look, she said “Why not”, so we went inside to a small wooden counter. The very nice lady who came to greet us spoke perfect English, although we had greeted her in Spanish with ‘Buena Dias’ 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, I forgave her the minute she used my favourite word and told me that due to my ‘senior status’ my entry was ‘Free’ 🤗 Although Shazza’s entry fee was the princely sum of €2.50, “You could have lied about your age, she hadn’t asked me for any proof” I said, “Darling” she smiled sarcastically, “There may have been a very good reason that she did not require any documentary evidence in your case” 😲🥺

Whilst from the outside, due to the different colouring of the stonework, the building looked quite narrow, however, once inside, it was quite a wide, spacious and long building and comprised of two storeys. Now I know what some of you may already be thinking, Eric and Shazza, self-confessed history heathens, spending time, and money, in a history museum 🤔 Let me just say, it appears that with age comes an acquired taste for more refined cultural knowledge, I was obviously now at that ‘Senior Status’ in my life, Shazza however was still not quite there yet, but like my love of roaming around Castles and Lighthouses and recent interest in the ‘Knights Templar’ and history of the ‘Moors’, she was prepared, at least for now, to tolerate my latest geriatric interests, but I was under no illusion that the minute I startled dribbling from the corner of my mouth, and not remembering her name, that I would have perhaps have begun to push her tolerance a bit too far, so I made sure that I always now carried a packet of tissues, and a card with her name on it, in my pocket 😂

I found it quite interesting to read how, in the earlier periods of history, that Refugees from other countries were openly welcomed into other lands, and that rather than have a fear, or mistrust of them, they took advantage of their many skills, and knowledge, to enhance and even improve their own lands commerce and industry. We often hear academics these days say that we can learn a lot from history, but it is becoming quite apparent to me that more often than not, we do not. Perhaps ‘Starmer’ does have a plan to improve the UK’s ailing NHS and Social Care System and perhaps even other industries and professions with the influx of foreign refugees, especially in those areas where we, the UK, lack those skills or knowledge, or even dare I suggest, the refugee work ethic, only time will tell I suppose 🤷‍♂️ Then again, we could mistrust them all, let them drown at sea and then tell ourselves every Sunday in church that underneath, we really are God Fearing Christians 🙏

I have to say that I was actually quite glad that we had stumbled upon this museum, although the reality was that I am really still a bit of a history heathen, as I skipped a lot of the exhibits that didn’t interest me and as for Shazza, well she was waiting for me outside, her interest had faded quite rapidly after first entering the museum and she had raced around it, perhaps if their had been a section on farming and the ancient ways of growing fruit and vegetables….. 🤷‍♂️ After the Museum we just continued with the same method of our explorations, wandering aimlessly until we found something else of interest, but I knew that I now had to find something to attract Shazza’s interest, although there would be no Stately Homes here for her to wander around, 🤔 but, I thought to myself………..she does like a nice church, and their were plenty of those to choose from.

Now you can call it a coincidence if you like, but quite possibly this was what they mean by ‘Divine Intervention’, for as we wandered along a narrow alleyway, we came into a square, a Plaza, the street name was ‘Calle Duquesa’, the same name as the small Marina near where we live, ‘Puerta Duquesa’ 😲 There was the usual high walls, the usual large wooden fortress looking doors, one of which was open, we looked inside to a courtyard which we later discovered is the ‘Patio de Los Naranjos’ (Courtyard of the Orange Trees) and the entrance to the Santa Maria Church. There would be no ‘Free’ admission for me here, but they did offer a reduction and so for the total princely sum of €3.60 we went for a look around. There was actually a staircase to an upper level before entering the church, but no, just in case you are wondering, it wasn’t the stairway to heaven and there were no pearly gates 🤭 just to a church museum, that wasn’t really of much interest to either of us, gold religious relics locked behind thick glass cabinets. We do find that churches are, generally, quiet places, and Shazza seems to find a sort of inner peace once inside them and will take the time to sit with her own private thoughts, or even say a prayer, I don’t know and I never ask. Whilst she has her personal space I just like to wander around, mainly to admire the amazing colours, and pictorial scenes, depicted in the stain glassed windows, or to wonder at the stone carvings in the pillars and on the gigantic ceilings, and think about the time and the effort, and engineering, that went into the construction of these buildings in periods of history where there were no modern day machinery.

Whilst I was wandering around in silence, suddenly, as the sun shone through the stained glass windows, their colours were reflected on the adjacent walls, as clouds passed, blocking the sun’s rays, they would disappear again, only to re-appear once again as the clouds cleared, it was like a ‘Kaleidoscope’ show and it entertained me for quite some time, ‘little things please little minds’, I know, but what can I say 🤷‍♂️

Show over and Shazza’s quiet contemplation finished, we left the church into the bright sunshine again and just continued with our wandering.

It had gone past lunchtime, we should have been hungry but neither of us were, but we did both agree that we needed a coffee, if only to enable us to rest our legs for a while and to take the opportunity to finally consult the tourist map so that we could see if their was anything we had missed that needed further exploration. Eventually, after walking through numerous narrow alleyways, small Plaza’s, and passing several more churches, we finally found ourselves at the bottom of the ‘Old Town’ and back by the ‘Seville Gate’ and right on the corner was a small Cafe/Bar. We discovered, after consulting the map, and identifying several landmarks and buildings on it, that we had actually zig zagged our way, up, down and across most of the ‘Old Town’, our tiring legs confirming the fact 🙄

There was one thing left that we both wanted to do, the walk along the fortress wall, and conveniently we were right opposite the ‘Tourist Information’ Office where we could gain access to it, again there would be an admission fee, but once again I was to hear my favourite word ‘Free’, although not for the youngster who was with me, that would cost another €2, she is getting to become expensive to take out on these city tours 😂 It was only when we went in to the Tourist Office that we learnt that these were not just walls to the city, but that it was actually formerly a fortress in its own right, one that dated back to the 12th Century BC 😲 Since that time numerous other occupiers of the city, from the ‘Carthaginians’, whoever they were 🤷‍♂️ to the ‘Romans’, had built upon and extended it, and it is alleged that Julia’s Ceaser had referred to it as, ‘The best defended city in Andalucía’, or ‘Betica’, as the region was known at the time, we do of course only have the historians word on that, even I am not that old to be able to confirm whether he actually truly spoke those words, and I wondered, even if he did, why would anyone who was with him at the time, bother to write those words down 🤷‍♂️ But there I go again, letting my cynical nature come to the fore 🤭

There were several levels to this former fortress, we climbed the stairways to all of them and looked into various rooms, through archer’s windows etc. however, we could not walk too far along the walls themselves, as they were either blocked off with safety barriers, or the old turreted walkways where soldiers once walked, these were now blocked off by the walls of more modern dwellings that had been erected along them. But we had both enjoyed this bit of exploration and agreed that, in comparison, this had been far more interesting than what the ruined fortress would have been, the one that we were unable to enter at the start of the day.

As we exited the Tourist Information Office, the lady behind the counter asked what other places we had visited, we told her where we had been over the last couple of days. She advised us that at the top of the ‘New Town’ there was the ‘Necropolis’ and ancient ‘Ampitheatre’, and she pointed to it on our map. We decided that we needed to go and take a look, then we would at least have seen it all, so it meant going back out through the ‘Seville Gate’, up the main modern high street and a lot further than we had walked the previous afternoon. Well, after all the effort, and it was uphill too, in the heat of the afternoon sunshine, we reached the Necropolis, but it was within a chain linked fence and looked just like a lumpy unkempt, grassed field, no obvious entry point to information board, and within that grassed field we saw the shape of an ‘Ampitheatre’, not a nice stone one with Roman Pillars, just big circles of grass shapes on different levels. I commented to Shazza that when we managed our 8 Acre Grass Campsite, using my John Deere Ride-On Mower, I could have reproduced exactly the same effect, she laughed and said that it would certainly have looked a lot neater than this grass field did. But we believe that it was ‘Fate’ that brought us to this point, as it was the end of our explorations and sightseeing, and as it just happened, had we not have come here we would not have discovered, on our way back, on the main high street in this modern part of Carmona, the most wonderful Oasis. Yes, a Tapas and Cafe/Bar, where the on-tap ice cold different flavoured beers all cost €1.50, and the majority of the extensive list of assorted Tapas cost just €1, or €2 if you ordered the ‘Media’ portion. It was late afternoon, the sun was shining, we were both thirsty and hungry, and we had nowhere else to explore. So we sat amongst the locals, or perhaps they were Spanish tourists, we couldn’t discern between them as their was not one single tourist map in sight, and we ate several Tapas, and quaffed several ice cold beers, almost the perfect ending to our mini-adventure.

For some inexplicable reason the walk back to our hotel didn’t seem to take that long 🥴🥴 I can neither confirm, or deny, that when we returned to our hotel room, whether we both engaged in a spot of personal contemplation or not, but when we had completed our respective periods it was dark outside 😂 Once again we enjoyed Dinner in the same hostelry as we had the previous evening, although Dinner sounds just a tad formal, this was more a small bar meal, as for some reason neither of us was that hungry 🤔 Although we must have been thirsty as we ‘each’ consumed several glasses of rather pleasant Anti-Covid Vaccines 🍷🍷🍷, it would of course have been rude not to.

We were awake very early the following morning, we did not sleep any better on that second night, for exactly the same reasons as on the first night, in fact we even considered whether the place was haunted as the noises, and timings of them, were identical to the night before. The mysterious click-click noise, loud voices in the corridors, banging of room doors and exactly the same scraping noise of furniture on the tiled floors in the room above us 😲👻

We had considered returning via the mountain road route, which would have been a slightly longer journey, just to see much more interesting scenery and we were not in a rush. However, whilst we were checking out, the receptionist, who happened to travel in to work from Malaga everyday along that route, told us that since the floods, with all the repair work and the construction traffic, it was taking a lot longer. So we made the decision to return on the same route we had travelled coming to Carmona. As soon as we stepped outside we could feel the chill in the air, the sky was grey and when we drove away we put on the car heating, it was only 12 degrees(c), we were not used to these sort of temperatures and we had put on our shorts and tee-shirts just as a matter of habit 🥶 It wasn’t until we were nearly home, within 30 miles, that we drove into sunshine, the clouds cleared, the sun was shining in an almost cloudless blue sky, the temperature had risen to a very pleasant 19 degrees(c). As we arrived back on the East Coast, to see the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea once again, and to feel the warmth, was like receiving the best ‘Welcome Home’ present ever. We arrived home at lunchtime, it didn’t take long to unpack and we were soon sat on the balcony with a sandwich and lovely hot cuppa, it had been a nice short mini-adventure, we had enjoyed visiting Carmona and we could now cross it off the ‘To Do’ List, but I do have to say that it was so nice to be back home.

We had done enough walking over the last couple of days so we just spent the rest of the day relaxing in the afternoon sunshine on the balcony, the temperature had risen to 23 degree(c) by mid-afternoon and there was barely a breeze, the sea was as flat as a millpond. We knew that we had both over-indulged during the last two days, on both food and alcohol, especially Shazza who rarely drinks much alcohol these days, although we were not feeling guilty about it, that’s what taking these mini-adventures is all about, doing things differently, but were both glad to now get back on to the straight and narrow, well, in my case, perhaps only for the next couple of days 😉

As a footnote, we have both read about ‘Storm Bert’ that is currently affecting many parts of the UK, strong winds, floods, snow and ice. We can appreciate, for obvious reasons, what some of you ‘may’ be going through at this time, however, we do sincerely hope that you are not in any danger and that you are able to stay safe, dry and warm 🙏❤️

Until the next time…………….

Hasta Luego mi Amigos