Road trip, Part 1

That morning I was equally excited and nervous when we walked from our rented apartment in Fuengirola to car rental place.
The car rental guy was Finnish so we didn't have any language problems while renting our car and soon we had our own handsome red car for the next two days. I am an girl so don't bother asking make or the model of the car, heh. It's enough for me that the car is running so it could take me from point A to point B and back. Though I took a photo from the license plate that we wouldn't loose it in the parking lot if there is other red cars.

So, we had our handsome red car (Did I mention already that the car was red?) and we were ready to go. Toni, my boyfriend and also my map reader put Zahara de la Sierra in navigator and the road trip begin. Fuengirola - Zahara de la Sierra 127 km.

To the excited/nervous part, I was driving! In a different country where for a small town girl there was hell-of-a-lot other drivers around. We made out of the city okay, and to a toll booths. We don't have those in Finland so it was new to me, and somehow exciting too. I know, sounds stupid to be excited about tolls.
I drove to the toll booth machine and doe to my "back seat drivers" who were making sure that i didn't hit anything I didn't. But all the other drivers got good laughs, I am sure, watching this short Finnish chick hanging half way out of the window trying to reach that machine.

Narrow serpentine roads was my and every other driver next challenge. I didn't dare to drive as fast as others, in unknown curvy roads so I was pain in the other drivers buts. Except they were behind me, heh.
Anyhow we made it to Zahara de la Sierra, beautiful small town, little drive away from the coast. And the battle between me and parking lots started. I am almost certain that the parking lots won. So sure that I could find us a park in the town i drove to a only parking carage there was. It was almost empty but the lots were all reserved. This nice old gentlemen tried to help us with our parking, problem, he didn't speak any english and my spanish is passable at best so we ended up thanking him and driving out of the carage. The streets in Zahara de la Sierra are really really really narrow so driving out of town wasn’t as easy as it seems but we founded our selfes nice parking spot at the side of the road just out side of town.

Much earned drink was in order after that. In town there were these nice spanish taverns, we choosed one and sitted outside in the table. It were one of the best orange juices I have ever drinked!

Our next move was to climb up to Castle Olvera. Our group got separated, one of the girls didn’t want to walk all the way up because of the heat so she and her boyfriend stayed down in the town, while me, Toni and our friend started the walk up to the castle. The weather was perfect, hot, but perfect, sun was shining, no clouds to be seen, I got my sun cream and water, no complaining here.
The view up from the Castle was amazing. You could see Embalse the Zahara with mountains on the backround, well worth the hike.

At the drive back to Fuengirola we stopped in Ronda for a lunch in a local tavern and little sightseeing. One of our group decided to hike down the ravine, while rest of us stayed in the square drinking beer and playing cards. Holiday at its best. Afterwards I have regret a little for not going down in the ravine too but lucky for me, it looked great from the above too!