Spain, Day Six--The Capilla and Getting Locked Out

 Our last day in Grenada.  Hard to believe.

Glo's request for the trip was for us to visit the chapel where Isabella (Queen Isabel de Castile) and Ferdinand were buried: the Royal Chapel of Grenada.  To her credit, she arranged the tour and everything (for which I was very thankful).  Tours aren't usually given of the capilla so she had to arrange a private tour.

We checked out of our AirBnb and actually got the cars out of the parking structure easily.  It was the first time I had seen them tucked away, and to Mark and Trevor's credit, they had parked them perfectly.  We found a parking structure fairly close to the capilla which made me question if we could've driven everyday....but where's the fun (and steps) in that?

We met our guide (literally can't remember his name), and we were off.  Just standing outside, waiting to get in, Glo pointed out the F and I running around the structure, something I wouldn't have even noticed.  Can you spot them? Also, Glo (being our unofficial tour guide) pointed out the recurring motif of the yoke and arrows.  Ferdinand is represented by a yoke because his marriage to Isabella was a political binding of kingdoms, and Isabella's is arrows, symbolizing that a quiver of arrows can not be broken when held together. Can you find the symbols?

Photos aren't allowed inside the Chapel at all--Isabella collected art so there is an amazing collection--so here is a photo of the greatest piece of art I saw during the entire trip:

Isabella is known for sending Christopher Columbus off on his voyage to find a different trading route to the Indies which led to his discovery of America, but she did so much more. This is "The Capitulation of Granada", otherwise knows as "The Surrender of Granada".  The influence of the Moors can be seen throughout all of Andalucía which is because the Moors owned it for 800 years.  It wasn't until Isabella came along that she defeated the Moors in 1492.  Isabella was never supposed to rule but because of brothers who were incapable (or dead), she became the Spanish ruler of the Iberian peninsula and really ushered in modern-day Spain.  Her husband, Ferdinand, was meh in comparison to her, so this painting is true to life:  Isabella in the forefront when Muhammed XII surrendered the Alhambra (seen in the background).

Isabella wanted to be buried in a simple and humble ceremony, and she was initially buried in a nearby monastery, but when her husband died just months after her, her remains were moved to the capilla where Ferdinand directed that they both have elaborate tombs.  Their bodies are still stored in the underground crypt, but the mausoleum is something to behold.  Something this photo doesn't capture that our guide pointed out is that when viewed from behind the pillows, the head of Isabella sinks lower into the pillow symbolizing the weight of her figurative crown.

In the art history section of the Humanities seminar in my high school, we studied Boticelli's The Birth of Venus (c. 1484), or how we as teenagers remembered it "Venus on the Half Shell".  While touring Isabella's art history collection (which when I remember that she died in the early 1500s stands as a very old collection), I didn't even need to be told that this piece was Boticelli's because of the similarities:

The Agony in the Garden, c. 1500

The crazy thing about this painting is that it's the only known painting to have been exported out of Italy during Boticelli's lifetime.  People speculate that a merchant dealing in luxury goods brought it to Spain to Queen Isabel.

Anyway, it was a fascinating tour, and our guide told us that he also did tours of Alhambra.  No joke, I wish we had known that three days and $500 earlier....  We did get some fun things in the high-quality gift shop.  Many of the items were Catholic-inspired/themed, but felt ornaments of Isabel and Ferdinand? I was turning a bit green with envy after I saw that Glo had bought them for her own Christmas tree.

I had to grab one last photo of all of us in Granada before we left.  I will mention one thing here because Hannah never will.  She is wearing an older Boden dress, and for all of us, we LOVE it on her....but she does not, and we didn't see it the rest of the trip.  I'm glad I have it immortalized here.

We then got back on the road and headed to Ronda.  Once again, the Spanish countryside did not disappoint, and we were thrilled once we arrived at the AirBnb where the kids were all staying.

When I first started planning this trip, I found the cutest, most idyllic AirBnb in Arriate, just ten minutes north of Ronda.  I figured we would appreciate staying in the country after having been land-locked in the city of Granada for three days.  When Mark and Allison decided to join us, I didn't want to give up our (strict!) six-person AirBnb, so I kept that reservation, and made a separate reservation for a small apartment in Ronda proper.  My plan was that Allison and Mark could stay in the apartment, but John was having none of that! ;-)  In the end, it probably worked out best for us to be in Ronda since it was in the 90s each day and the apartment's A/C could get the temp down to 60 (perfect for John), but I did feel a bit cheated because I REALLY wanted to stay in the cute AirBnb.

We arrived and got into the house without any trouble.  But we wanted to explore the grounds and find the pool.  On the way, we found a mulberry tree, dripping with sweet fruit.  And there were flowers, and beautiful places to sit.  And we found the pool.

But we hadn't been there even ten minutes before everything fell apart.  Several different people had walked out of the house, not realizing that the doors locked behind them....and Glo, who had been put in charge of the key, had thought that leaving it on top of the refrigerator would be a good idea.  Wow, you want to see how people handle stress differently?  It was the spectrum.  Mark was outside in the shade singing to himself, trying to stay calm.  Glo was in tears.  I was trying my best not to play the blame game but knowing that I have no kind of poker face.

Long story short (and I mean a LONG story that I don't really want to revisit because nobody would listen to John who is the master of these types of situations), the Kennedys came through again and ending up crawling through a window to the adjacent house and walking through an inside door that was connected to our house. I mean, what is a Kennedy vacation without somebody needing to crawl through a second-floor window?

We went out to dinner where the waitress who sounded like she was some Caribbean country corrected Glo's Spanish. No bueno.  The food was fine, but the gelato was perfect as always.  And in a fun turn of events, I found one of the baby boutiques that Nancy is always telling me about.  I seriously could've bought everything in the store, but I got three darling outfits for Clarke, and two for Imogen.  Looking back now, I don't know why we didn't buy ten for each!