The GCW Tour, Spain & Morocco: A Vacation from Vacation

With a very early wake up call, we're pretty much done with Tarifa. We walked the old town and the beaches, bought some postcards (the niece), refrigerator magnets (me), and other accessories (niece), and then found a Mexican restaurant of all places for dinner. I couldn't pass up their margarita menu, and the food turned out to be really quite good. 

Plus, the niece got her first taste of deep fried ice cream. It wasn't bad, though I recall the restaurant I worked at in high school making better.

Getting back to Tarifa, aside from souvenir shops, our walk also took us to the Island of Doves. It used to be an actual island, but now there's a walkway that will get you there. The walkway separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean Sea, and the island is officially the southern most point in Europe. You can still see defenses from ancient times through World War II overlooking the beach. 

But now that the niece has been to the southern most point of Europe, I've convinced her she needs to see the North, East and West points as well. I'm pretty sure I've seen the eastern most (Istanbul?), but north and west I've yet to reach. I sort of hope the niece gets there before me, and she seemed eager to try.

But all of this sort of over sells Tarifa. I've always been of the mind that there are two kinds of vacations: the kind where you run around trying to see everything, and the kind where you lay around trying to do nothing. For the most part European destinations fall in the former group, but Tarifa really belongs in the latter. 

It's sort of nice to have a vacation of the second type stuck into the middle of your vacation of the first type. For the first time since we got here, it's been a really relaxing day.