Granada

(the actual blog post also has lots of pictures if you click through to the page)

(As you will see, we are several weeks behind in our updates here. Traveling with two young kiddos is a fun adventure, but it also leaves us pretty exhausted at the end of each day. If you'd like to follow along through just our photo album, please email and we can share that link with you.)

After a brief 24 hours near the coast, we spent our first full week in Granada. Kate scored a sweet Airbnb apartment relatively near the ancient town center but (perhaps more importantly) also right across the street from one of the best playgrounds around! This has become a theme of traveling with kids under 6: Where is the nearest playground?

Their favorite mini merry-go-round they rode over and over and over:

Other fun playgrounds- Federico Garcia Lorca and Parque de las Ciencias:

Much of our time was spent just wandering the streets.

The girls were enthralled by the sidewalk dispensers that give out small plastic balls filled with a surprise toy – something we were able to add as a reward for their "star chart."

We have been impressed by their daily imaginative play; their ages are really sweet for making up stories as siblings. Here is Nell's shop she made one evening.

We were even able to attend an early evening flamenco show – so impressive – ¡olé!

Eric also got two forays into the nearby Sierra Nevada (snowy mountains). He was impressed that a park with 10,000 ft peaks is within a 30-minute drive from town. It was too snowy to ascend, but there were many beautiful lower trails to explore.

Kate and the girls rode the bus around town, exploring other playgrounds, getting some sweet treats (so many bakeries!), and also partaking in a pretty standard early afternoon ritual: the girls watch some shows while the parents take a nap!

We pretty quickly realized that eating out is not going to be particularly enjoyable on this trip – the girls have a difficult time staying in their chairs, are super messy eaters, and prefer to make music with their utensils rather than eat much of what is ordered for them. We have better luck cooking for ourselves or at least feeding the girls before we try to have a light meal out. We have occasionally resorted to letting the girls watch a show quietly on our phone while we try to eat in a restaurant. It works surprisingly (disturbingly?) well, but it's not really a habit we'd like to develop. There is a reason we don't see many families with young children eating out!

In Granada, we did make it to the famous Alhambra – a walled city that sits high atop a hill, built more than 800 years ago. It was a beautiful, huge place to wander around. I think we only actually saw a fraction of it, as you could easily spend multiple days there, and we were walking at a 3-year-old pace. I was disappointed that they don't offer any pamphlets or audio guides, except for one you can (supposedly) download on your phone (but it wasn't working for us) – so we were mostly just enjoying what we saw without any context. I did find the intricate designs of some of the inner palaces to be particularly breathtaking. I later learned from a short documentary that the intricate honeycomb designs of the inner domes (which look like optical illusions) are called muqarnas domes – a unique, incredible feature of Islamic architecture from the 12th and 13th centuries. I also learned that the aqueducts feeding the high-walled city and its extensive gardens were a fabulous feat of engineering for the time.

It was nice to be in one place for a week and really get oriented, at least in the central part of town. We both could've stayed longer, but our downstairs neighbors were happy we were only there for a week – we got a complaint pretty early on that our girls were being too noisy (moving kitchen chairs around in the early evening). We tried our best to be quieter, but we could only do so much. I know that being a downstairs neighbor can really suck (ask me about the bed box story sometime). We prefer not to be above anyone if we can help it, but many of our rentals are apartments. At least I can say we keep reasonable hours – we've been able to pretty consistently get the girls to bed between 9–10 p.m. (we have shifted our schedule a bit) and are up around 8 a.m. We are so grateful they are good sleepers – relatively few night awakenings, despite all the different transitions!