In which Sid and Doris enjoy a day talking sailing and the expat life before the day long drive via Osuna to spend the evening in Granada.
Our friends Mark and Carolyn have been living aboard a 33’ boat for some years and have invested in a large cockpit tent. This is the maritime equivalent of building a granny-roaster on the side of your house. (Politely these are known as conservatories, though what is being conserved is unknown.)
We sit dry with a full view of the marina despite the showers blowing through. This might be an answer to the deck saloon question: how can I get to see the places I have sailed to when it is too cold, wet, dark to sit out? Alternatively, may I suggest the very nice Marina Rio Hotel where we have a room and balcony with marina view? (Chez Mark and Carolyn is just behind the prow of the large blue-hulled motor boat)
Pause for a couple more artistic marina shots:
Anyway, we have much to catch up on: the oddness of parents, getting Portuguese residency, VAT on boats after Brexit, and more excitingly their plans to build a house. Carolyn is a real Architectress so already much thought has been given to converting the small dwelling they have bought into one they would like to live in for ten years. Sid and Doris offer their labour when the hour comes. And more enthusiastically, they offer their labour for any more Azores/Canaries/transAtlantic/cross-Biscay sailing plans.
Time in Lagos brought the opportunity for a Goan curry, Goa having been Portuguese, and also the opportunity for loads of dreadful puns along the lines of go-on have a curry. 
More exciting for Miftah Bat is the finding that blue pants are lucky. (“New Year, New You, Wear Lucky Blue” the floor sticker advises.) Probably just as well founded as astrology and homeopathy. But who doesn’t like new pants?
A
lthough Hermann purrs smoothly along the mostly-empty motorways, with the final drops of mist beading on his gleamy paintwork, the drive to Granada will still take most of the day. This calls for a lunchtime break off the motorway and Osuna looks both handy and picturesque.
Osuna is a small hill town with a parking problem. People have got around this by converting their front rooms into garages. What a good idea, we could cram in another four.
We have a small but perfectly formed lunch (we thought we had mis-read the menu when we saw “fried quail’s egg”) , a short walk, a quick admire of the studded doors on the pretty houses and are soon reminded that time and tide wait for nomon. Time to go, says the dial.
The countryside is 100% olives.
As we climb, the olive fields get steeper but they are still there.
Round some final hills and you know Hermann has climbed a long way (mostly without pinking) when you see the snowy Sierra Nevada towering over Granada.
Our hotel, the Hospes Los Pratos is a converted bourgeois mansion with new wings and underground stabling. It is so grand that our room has its own indoor pool, shown here with S for scale. However, it is not the swimming people come for. It is the Moorish Alhambra palace and Generalife on the hill for which no tickets are currently showing on the booking system for the rest of the year, alas.
Despite the season and Omicron Granada is thoroughly touristed. We slightly regret leaving our first beer and tapas shop once we see the milling crowds outside. The hotel concierge told us that the Spanish eat at 9pm onwards but restaurants do open at 8pm or sometimes as early as 7:30. In practise, by 7:31 every table is full of hungry tourists. We do find a restaurant where their food is good but as much fun is to be had watching the waitress multi-multi-tasking to keep the tables turning over at peak eating hour.
In common with all the other hotels on this trip the staff here are really great, but we are asking for a miracle: tomorrow they are going to try to magic up tickets and a guide for The Alhambra.
PS On reviewing this post Doris said that the picture of S did not help to put the bath in perspective, so Sid was asked to sit in it. He said it was cold and uncomfortable and there was absolutely no way he would get in it except with all his clothes on.
You may enjoy yourself looking up the latent heat of marble. Then your challenge is to work out for a bath made from 1″ (2.5cm) thick marble sitting in a room at 21’C, being filled with water originally at 38’C, what would the eventual temperature of the bath be. For ease of calculation you can assume the bath fills instantly and is 1m wide, 2m long and on average 50cm deep, also that the thermal transmission rate through the marble is instantaneous.