As promised here is the separate post about getting to and from Malaga. When we landed earlier in the week we stopped in Malaga - and actually drove quite a bit around the city in our attempt to get the Carrefour, but we didn't stop to take in any of the sites. Given how much we drove in Malaga you'd think it would have been easier to get around than say Granada, but it wasn't.
I suppose the first problem was when we looked up car parks in advance we read "there are numerous car parks that can be found along Avenida de Andalucia" - in hindsight I think this is true if you are driving the *other* way along the road. Avenida de Andalucia is a neat street. It is quite large and it is divided by a rather large median which has green space and palm trees. On one side is a park and then the ocean. It reminded me of Los Angeles, it even had a guy working out in the park like Venice Beach... rather entertaining.
We finally found a "P" for parking and jumped at the chance. The signs took us through a bit of windy road to a car park that seemed close to what looked like a fish market. We were behind another car waiting to enter. We sat there for probably 5 minutes behind this car unsure of why it wasn't entering the car park. Given our limited (non existant) Spanish we had no choice but to wait. At one point we wanted to leave and find another car park, but someone had pulled in behind us so this wasn't an option... we waited discussing what was going on. Convinced he was not a tourist given the vehicle, we figured he knew what he was doing.
Eventually a light (which we had noticed before, but were still confused as to why it was there) turned green, he took a ticket and entered. We did the same. We found a *very* tight spot and Mark managed to pull in without incident. Shortly after we noticed a number of cars driving back down the car park and we figured out what the lights were for. The car park was one way only! There is an operator that turns all the lights in the car park to green to let the cars out while holding the cars from going in and vice versa. It was a pretty neat system. It is a good thing that it was operated by a man as getting out of the spot was not as easy. It ended up being a 15 point turn to get out... it was a bit stressful as there was a car waiting... but Mark did a spectacular job (with some great directing by me and screaming from Emily) and we found our way out.
We wanted to stop off at the Carrefour (again) on the way out of town to grab some things. Given the amount of time we spent driving around trying to get to this same Carrefour when we arrived we thought this would be easy (we didn't even have the iPad/GPS then). Thing again... getting to the Carrefour was easy enough, we only missed one turn and had to be re-routed... and by that time we had figured out the "round about, but not really a round about" part of the road. Getting out... another story. With some less than stellar directing by me and a few incidents of Mark not listening to me we ended up the wrong way a couple of times... in one case we ended up on the highway going back to the airport instead of back to Nerja... thankfully we had our trusty iPad/GPS which set us straight and we headed home.
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