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We did not leave Sevilla until nearly 1pm, alas, due to complications of moving Vicky and getting up too late. We decided to go by way of Ronda anyway, partly because we´re crazy but mostly because Ronda is where Vicky stayed for a month on an exchange study program a few years ago, and it is a town with an absurdly scenic river gorge.
It was a bit of an adventure to get into the city, but we managed, we admired the gorge, and we ate lunch at a nearby hotel. Then we decided to take the mountain road south to San Pedro de Alacante on the Costa del Sol. That road is damn curvy and steep, though quite well-engineered.
We stopped at a service plaza just west of Marbella to get diesel and snacks, and then turned north on the A-92M toward Antequerra, which also leads indirectly to Sevilla, Cordoba, and Granada. It was fully dark by that point, which did not make Mom particularly happy.
We got thoroughly lost upon entering Granada, just as we´d gotten lost upon entering Seville. In the end we resorted to the equivalent of double-parking for fifteen minutes while Vicky walked around looking at street signs attempting to figure out where we were. But we reached our hotel in the end, Vicky and Mom successfully found the associated garage, and we found a nearby restaurant that served a decent dinner.
And now I am typing this on the unfamiliar Spanish keyboard of the hotel´s free internet station, which is why I haven´t put accent marks where they should appear on the city names above. Alas for technical limitations!
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While we were on the road, the Yuletide 2010 archive went live, which means I got a story! It is for Joan D. Vinge´s Psion trilogy, and more specifically, it´s sort of an alternate epilogue to Catspaw, the middle book, wherein Cat is hired by the taMing family ostensibly to use his telepathy to help prevent the assassination of a family member who´s a candidate for an important political position; the job is, of course, much more complicated than that, and Cat gets into all kinds of trouble trying to figure out what he´s been dumped into and how to get out while also helping the people he´s come to care about in the meantime.
My gift story works much better if you know the canon, but I think it´s a nice character and world-building piece on its own. So go read it! Close the Mind Out, by an author who shall remain anonymous for another week.
It was a bit of an adventure to get into the city, but we managed, we admired the gorge, and we ate lunch at a nearby hotel. Then we decided to take the mountain road south to San Pedro de Alacante on the Costa del Sol. That road is damn curvy and steep, though quite well-engineered.
We stopped at a service plaza just west of Marbella to get diesel and snacks, and then turned north on the A-92M toward Antequerra, which also leads indirectly to Sevilla, Cordoba, and Granada. It was fully dark by that point, which did not make Mom particularly happy.
We got thoroughly lost upon entering Granada, just as we´d gotten lost upon entering Seville. In the end we resorted to the equivalent of double-parking for fifteen minutes while Vicky walked around looking at street signs attempting to figure out where we were. But we reached our hotel in the end, Vicky and Mom successfully found the associated garage, and we found a nearby restaurant that served a decent dinner.
And now I am typing this on the unfamiliar Spanish keyboard of the hotel´s free internet station, which is why I haven´t put accent marks where they should appear on the city names above. Alas for technical limitations!
---------------
While we were on the road, the Yuletide 2010 archive went live, which means I got a story! It is for Joan D. Vinge´s Psion trilogy, and more specifically, it´s sort of an alternate epilogue to Catspaw, the middle book, wherein Cat is hired by the taMing family ostensibly to use his telepathy to help prevent the assassination of a family member who´s a candidate for an important political position; the job is, of course, much more complicated than that, and Cat gets into all kinds of trouble trying to figure out what he´s been dumped into and how to get out while also helping the people he´s come to care about in the meantime.
My gift story works much better if you know the canon, but I think it´s a nice character and world-building piece on its own. So go read it! Close the Mind Out, by an author who shall remain anonymous for another week.
