Driving Around in Spain: Antequera to Granada

We rented a car in Spain to help us get around and see the various sites since our main hotel was not in a major city. We took a lot of day trips. The biggest trip was going to Granada where we stayed two nights before returning to the Mediterranean coast. In the morning we drove to Antequera, spent some time wandering around, then headed to our hotel in Granada.

Driving from Antequera to Granada was not so bad. Our GPS's maps are about two years old and have been not fully accurate for Spain, leading to some nerve-wracking moments early in the trip. The GPS continued to be confused about newly built highways, but the highway signs were helpful enough for even non-Spanish speakers. The toughest part was in Granada itself, dealing with one-way streets and the slight mis-timing of the GPS at the corner or fork where we were supposed to go one way but didn't get the information in time. We circled around where our apartment was twice before finding street parking.

Then we had to find the street where the apartment was, which involved circling around twice on foot. We finally buzzed the apartment of the right building and made it up to our cozy apartment. The lady had just finished washing up towels and such and had them hung out in the enclosed balcony to dry. She gave us the keys and a rough idea of how to get our car into the garage.

After she was gone, we decided to reverse engineer parking our car in the garage. We took the elevator down to the garage (which required a special elevator key). We found the proper spot and the door out of the apartment building's section of the underground parking. We couldn't get the door to open to the garage exit until we found the key hole on the other side of the door. Luckily a small, human-sized door let us out of the garage entrance. We found figured out the right key to get the larger car door open. We returned to the surface, circled around twice on our way to our car.

Driving back to the entrance wasn't too bad. We were three turns away from the entrance: a right, a left, and a u-turn. We were quite proud to only circle around once! My wife hopped out to unlock the first door which did not want to open. She had to "encourage" it with some elbow grease. We finally made it in and unloaded the car, hoping we wouldn't have to deal with it again until we left Granada.

More on Granada next!