Gibraltar: Casino’s and …

29 juillet - 3 august 2018

While Lisbon should be on your city trip bucket list, please leave out Gibraltar if you’re not into casino’s, junk food and throw up parties. There’s nothing to do in Gibraltar. It’s dirty, full of cars, bad air, small dirty beaches, however they make up for it by being nice 😏
We stayed at the Ocean village marina, where they took good care of us. It’s noisy but close to the ship chandler, shops and the border with Spain. 

If you do have to stop there don’t miss the only interesting place: the monkey mountain. We hiked up there, which is uncommon and thus there are almost no signs and no footpaths. The tunnels on the north sides are quite impressive (8.9 km round trip) as are the caves in the south (6.5 km round trip). The monkeys are funny to watch and not cheeky at all if you leave them alone. 

The hike up to the Moorish castle on the north side.

View of the airport in the clouds.

Up towards the top!

Happy to have made it!

A backpack with a Louise 😜

The amazing Great Siege tunnels.

Flying over the clouds ...

The only footpath in town 😎

 The next pictures are from the hike up to the south side:

Saint Michael's caves

Just walking on the road ...

A well deserved drink after hiking 😝

Provisions, changes and laundry

With empty fridges and bilges (the boat's cellar's),  we needed to prepare our longer trips and anticipate the lack of products we could have in other countries. This is a task we're not so good at, I guess. We only ever shop for two weeks and never stock up for longer times. So with our trolly and two motivated girls we head out for an incredible task. We needed 4 shopping runs to go over all the isles in Morrissons, a good hour every time to find space in the boat and a gin tonic afterwards. The gin was to check if we bought a good bottle for our next visitors and to cool our brains down from this hard work 😇
While you have an incredible choice in Gin, we realised we did not buy enough wine in France. The choice here is limited and the last 10l won’t last very long, maybe we'll be more lucky in the next countries or we'll have to imagine our own distillery 😌

 

What the girls make when mum and dad are working 😏

To get some tools for the “final” changes we want to make to the boat we needed to go to La Linea in Spain. The view from "the other side" is actually quite stunning!

At the bus station of La Linea it’s very difficult to find someone to help you in Spanglish. They were actually so rude that we ran to the taxi when we saw him pass the train station's entrance 😳

Hup hup for a day in Leroy Merlin, Decathlon and a Burger King as reward for the girls.

The only thing we didn’t find is a remineralisation system for our water reserve and a filter system we can connect before putting water from the marina’s in our tanks. Since we have a new boat with clean water thanks we would like to be able to keep it safe to drink. When we are in open water we use a desalinator to add water to our reserves but this actually takes out all the minerals and we should be able to add some, especially for the girls. If you have any suggestions of material we can buy online, please leave us a message by mail.


We did give Anna and Louise some chill time at the beach, quite nice to see the tunnels we were exploring earlier that week!