Land ahoy

Wow eight fantastic days at sea and we finally hit land for the first time at Gibraltar, the Rock as they call it over here.  We docked around 7AM and we wanted to get an early start to see the few sights we hadn't see the last time we were here.  So we got off the ship around 10:40. I guess life at sea takes the gitty out of your gittyup.

As you can see from the above photo it was a little cloudy today.  The weather forecast for today was partly cloudy.  They were right on except the partly cloudy parts always had rain with it. That didn’t slow us down. We visited some of our favorite haunts as seen below.

When it’s raining in Gibraltar we always head for the Cock & Pullet!  The English always come up with some great names for their pubs.

We also found a coffee shop that is head and shoulders over Starbucks.  Below is a list of their specialty coffee drinks.

 

The only bad thing about this cafe was we couldn’t find any Starbucks-type cards to buy to take back for Christmas presents.  

Gibraltar is only two and a half square miles of land and most of that is taken up by the rock mountain.  It is noted for the Apes that live in and on the mountain.  The English have a saying that Gibraltar will always belong to Great Brittan as long as the apes are here.  So they treat them quite nicely.  They even have a drive in or should I say swing in store for them.  We got a great photo of it.

Being such a small country the kids don’t have much to do until they reach the age of 16.

After the age of 16 they keep busy somehow?

The Strait of Gibraltar is a very busy shipping area. Up until this morning we saw one small cargo ship during the entire Atlantic crossing.  Right before we went to dinner I stepped out onto our balcony and counted 16 ships coming and going in the strait.

This last photo is quite unique.  On the left side the dark area of land is the continent of Africa. The land on the right is the continent of Europe.  In the foreground is the Mediterranean Sea and way in the background is the Atlantic Ocean. The Strait is only eight miles wide at this point.