Saturday 29th January 2011

We collected the car on Thursday, a small Peugeot, but it has five doors and goes really well! The car hire company collected us from the campsite and drove us to their office a few minutes away and we can just drop the keys off at the camp reception when we’ve finished with it, really easy. We used the car to go and do a larger shop at Lidl’s, so we’re stocked up for a few days especially with wine (average 2euros max), which was getting a little low! Rainy morning but nice and sunny in the afternoon, suddenly everyone was out and about catching up on jobs!

Friday was still rainy but had blue patches of sky, so we decided to change our plans and head for Gibraltar. Easy drive to Gibraltar, which took just over an hour. Nothing on the road signs until we were there, funny that! Still you couldn’t miss it, as we came around a bend there in the distance was this huge rock! The town you have to go through to get onto Gibraltar is whichever way you look at it, a dump. We queued for about a mile in a zig zag route, like Disney queues and finally went through the border, cursory check, before queuing again as we had to wait for the plane to land. The road onto Gib crosses the runway!
Gibraltar is crowded with cars etc so you are constantly in a queue going somewhere. Most people have mopeds which they ride down the middle of the road, in and out the traffic, they must have loads of accidents with them. We found a parking space (in short supply) and went for a walk. We had English fish and chips in “Smiths” where the owner (a Yorkshire man) who has been there for 40 yrs was only too happy to have a chat and tell us about the “Rock”. It seems they have been running out of space for housing so have reclaimed some land and are building flats there. They had a Dutch company in to dredge up the sand and move it to the new building site, but forgot to warn them the dredging area was a munitions dumping ground!

Spent the afternoon dodging showers and having a wander around, before queuing to get off again. General conclusion was that it had some interesting historical places, but wouldn’t make a special trip to return.