Hola – plans v reality II…

To Seville – and beyond!

Now the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes work.

And sometimes they don’t!

With the dates, flights, accommodation and travel set in stone, there were a few misplaced problems to overcome.

Like certain places being closed on a Monday – the day we had planned to spend a full day wandering around Malaga.

Fortunately we found out the easy way that the times quoted in the guidebooks for the opening hours of the museum dedicated to Pablo Picasso were wrong, as we discovered when wandered aimlessly up a side street and unexpectedly found it open…

We did fill up the day though and thought that we could take a wander around the other places we’d thought about on either Tuesday or when we got back to Malaga on the Wednesday at the end of our trip.

Er, wrong in both cases. As you may have seen from the photo on Monday’s posting, it was raining (and then some!) on Tuesday so we stayed in our hotel reading and drinking coffee rather than trying to find out info on the iPad Mini as guess what – we couldn’t get onto the hotel’s Wi-Fi network, no matter how hard we tried…

With the weather against us, we also abandoned plans to walk to the coach station in Malaga and opted to take a taxi instead, a wise move when we saw how the deluge developed as we waited for our bus to Seville.

Although we’d planned to take that wander around the missed sights in Malaga on our final full day in Spain, that didn’t happen. We checked into the same hotel, dumped our bags on the room floor and turned on the TV.

Which revealed that there had been a major incident in London at places we’d only walked around in February.

With CNN being the only English speaking option on the hotel’s TV and that lack of Wi-Fi, a trip down to the lobby for a coffee and accessing the BBC coverage via the lobby computer was the only way we found out more about what had happened.

And so rewind a bit to our arrival in Seville. Which is where we actually wished that we had a decent street map to find our accommodation for the next four nights. I’d printed off three sheets of differing scales from Apple Maps that should have got us there, but didn’t.

After much scratching of the heads, we found one spot that almost correlated with the printouts and we took it from there using nous rather than the map.

Our Pension owner was welcoming, took our details and payment, showed us to our room and then gave us a much better map of Seville and a couple of recommendations for a flamenco club and a good tapas bar.

With the weather in Seville being distinctly better than it was in Malaga, a mooch around led to us doing a bit of a circuit for a while before we found a different tapas bar just up the street from where we were staying.

The fine weather continued for the rest of our stay in Seville, a factor that led to me taking a lot of photos in a short time. As we wandered around a market in a park, the space on the SD card finally ran out.

“No problem” or so I thought as I had another SD card in my camera pouch. On swapping them over however, I discovered that what I thought was a fresh card wasn’t – it was a full one!

Fortunately we were within a few metres of the main branch in Seville of El Cortes Ingles – a big department store along the lines of John Lewis here in the UK. I found their photo department, the memory card section and a 16GB Sony SD that was duly bought and installed – with a 3000 + shot capacity, I suspect that it may last me a while, even at my shooting rate!!!

Sod’s Law however did give this one a bit of a sting in the tail. I got back to the hotel, went into my charger pouch to get the camera charger and I remembered something.

That there was a new 4GB SD card in the pocket of the charger bag! D’oh!!!

Yes, it exists – photographed before the SD card cried ‘No more!’…