Having visited the Alhambra 20 years ago we were really keen to return and take the kids there.  The Alhambra was built around the 11^th century by the moors and was taken over by the Spanish in 1492 by Isabella and Ferdinand.  A great year for the Spanish!  There are three main things to visit, the Fort, the palace, and Generalife, the gardens.  We started with the Moorish gardens and interestingly it was what I remembered the most from when we had visited in 1986.   They are just wonderful and Jamie, not surprisingly being blessed with the gardening gene was in 7^th heaven.  Interestingly the Moors apparently wanted to create a heaven on earth and wondering around the gardens, even with large numbers of other tourists, it is truly a peaceful, beautiful place to be. 

The Moorish palace reminded us of Topkapi Palace, and the fort was quite extensive.  The whole place had fabulous views of Grenada and snowcapped mountains and clear blue skies.  Just wonderful.  We had run out of time for the old town, and Mike’s sore feet from his jump way back in Ibiza encouraged us to do a bit of a car tour of old Grenada.  Of course we had ignored lunch hour and were somewhat hypoglycemic by 3pm and had quick bite as we left town.  When we returned to the boat we did some calculations on getting around to Gibraltar and Cadiz.  The trick was to get the tide (having looked up how to spell that because we haven’t had tide in the Med) right for going through the Straits of Gib and into Cadiz.  Marry that up with the weather forecasts and a decision that we wanted to get to Cadiz in daylight and we realized that we needed to leave the following day around mid day!  This meant doing the Strait at night which was a bit sad, but with a forecast coming up in 36 hours that necessitated haste we just rode with it.  We had been really lucky with the weather window from Valencia to Cadiz and it was due to come to an abrupt end.