Monday, April 14th, 2009, Cadiz and Jerez, Andalusia, Spain

Bob:

We sailed into Cadiz quite early in the morning and enjoyed the softly lit panorama of the city. A rainbow greeted us over the remains of what looked like an old fort in the harbor. For our port call in Cadiz, we had earlier booked a Holland-America shore tour that included a sherry factory and a horse show. Our bus drove for about an hour from Cadiz through the countryside to the middle of Jerez, Spain, a small city about 40 miles to the North. Along the way we saw big mounds of sea salt and the huge evaporation ponds by which means the people in that area harvest it.

The sherry factory turned out to be a lot of oak barrels stacked carefully in what one lady thought was an old stables and horse show arena complex in the middle of Jerez. We learned the history and techniques of making sherry and other variations of fermented beverages from the palomino (white) grapes grown in vineyards in the region. Amontillado, I finally found out, was sherry that was left in the cask more than 5 years to do a final fermentation. The casks are hand-made from oak imported from the U.S. and apparently last a very long time. Curiously, enough even though we saw folks making the staves and barrels when our bus entered the sherry complex, that was not part of the tour! A mouse that had been trained to drink sherry was, however, part of the tour although for the life of me I could not see how having domesticated wild mice running amok among the casks of sherry could in any way be considered a positive advertisement for the beverage. Personally, I found it rather off-putting. I had more sympathy for letting the spiders alone in their webs as they would at least control other insects as our guide said. In fact, I tried to take a picture of one such spider while Monika, Phyllis and Lois were tasting the various types of sherries.

The horse show was very nicely done, but only Phyllis among us probably truly understood the difficulty and quality of the horsemanship we were observing. The performance consisted of solo performances, 4 and 10-horse routines, and airs above the ground practiced by riderless horses. Teams of four horses (mares according to the lady next to me) also pulled carriages with two drivers in a series of intricate maneuvers; I was quite surprised at how sharply those carriages could turn.

After returning to the ship in mid-afternoon, Monika and I also walked back into Cadiz just to take a look around. If you ever do that, be forewarned that many of the streets are twisting, narrow alleyways that are quite confusing to someone used to the "Standard Midwestern Grid" like I am. Monika got completely turned around, but with the aid of the decent map available from the Tourist Information people and my Garmin Nuvi 270 GPS that has detailed maps of all of Europe on it, we kept zig-zagging through Cadiz past the Cathedral and over to the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula.

There we found the ruins of the Roman Amphitheater that we were looking for, but the only entrance was chained shut, which was disappointing. We walked back along the seashore a bit past a school--a mass of kids was in the playground--and toward a row of beaches that stretched out as far as we could see. But by that time I was running out of steam again and we were running out of time before our ship set sail. So we curled back past the stone gateway to the "old town" section of Cadiz past the town hall and returned to the ship for the evening.