I had no real intention of blogging this holiday, but circumstances took over. Hence you had three blogs about our eventful first day. Since then, the holiday has progressed without too much drama. A few days out here and there, a few nice meals out, and a few nice meals in.

However, today we had a day out to be remembered. We are about an hour and a quarter away from Gibraltar and most of us have never visited it. People have many different reasons for visiting it, some involving monkeys, but for me the main reason was that a) you get your passport stamped and b) you get to walk across the middle of a runway, which sounds absolutely cool (unless of course there was a plane taking off or landing).

So, we decided to take a trip to Gibraltar. We did our research (well actually we could’ve done a bit more as we soon discovered) about the fact that you park on the Spanish side and walk-through with your passport to the Gibraltar side. This is much easier than trying to get a car across the border as it all gets very complicated as the queues of cars trying to get through customs confirmed when we walked past them this morning.

We entered Passport control, at which point Karen immediately tried to scan her passport by using the new fingerprint machine, which wasn’t even turned on. I think because she is so short that the man in the little passport control box hadn’t spotted her, but when he did, he snatched her passport off and gave her a stamp and sent her through, followed by me, Rach and Nik. As per usual Tibu went through a completely different channel and didn’t even get a stamp. I think he may consider getting a British passport just to collect stamps like a true British gentleman/old fart.

Once through passport control, the first thing that you see is a British telephone box which lots of tourists were taking pictures of, us included as I don’t know the last time, I saw a telephone box operational in the UK. We then had a good giggle at the fact that Gibraltar is twinned with Goole. No offence to Goole, it just made me laugh. 

Then it was a leisurely stroll over the runway and onto the town square. As we approached it, we could hear very loud music and a very big crowd. On Monday we went up to Mijas and discovered it was the day of the fiestas, and we saw many (mainly women) in traditional dresses which was all very festive and cultural, so we guessed it was something similar. However, as we were walking into the square I saw somebody walking the other way carrying a “keep Gibraltar British” flag. I didn’t even realise it was up for grabs again.   The other thing that we noticed was that everybody was wearing red and white.

The main square was heaving with thousands of people wearing red and white, a huge stage with a banner at the back proclaiming “Self-determination is our right” and various union jacks the size of buildings strewn around the square. Now I have been keeping up with the news slightly when I’ve been away, so I know that Reform had their Conference last week, but it felt as though they were having the after party in Gibraltar.

 The thing is, the five of us stood out like sore thumbs due to our attire. I think if Nikki turned up in her red Liverpool shirt, she would be an accepted (in fact I saw a few people wearing Liverpool shirts). However, if Tibu appeared wearing his red Spanish football shirt, I don’t think that he would’ve had such a favourable reaction. And if Rachel turned up wearing her Union Jack dress that she got when she was going to her Spice Girls phase in the 90s, who knows what would happen to us. 

Speaking of football, Gibraltar does have its own football team, and we passed the ground that they play at as it is right on the border. It called the Victoria Ground, named, we assumed, after the 19^th century monarch and not Victoria Beckham.  It must be the only football stadium where if a penalty taker misses the goal and the ball goes out of the stadium, depending on the wind direction it could either land in the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, on an international airport’s runway or even in a totally different country.

We edged our way around the square and up a side street to try and find somewhere just to have a cup of coffee. That’s when we spotted that every shop was closed. As we were walking, Tibu was looking at his phone and discovered that we had managed to plan our day trip to coincide with National day, the biggest bank holiday of the year and it was a big deal in Gibraltar.

With the huge Union Jacks, and the political slogans around the arena, if you just changed the colour, location and did it a couple of months earlier, it felt like something very familiar, but somewhere we didn’t really want to venture into (if you get my meaning).

After 20 minutes of trying to fight through the crowd we found a bar (the Royal Bar) that did at least have some seats so we could have a drink and regroup.

It has to be said that this was almost like an out of body experience for all of us. There are some very English things about the place, for example we passed Waitrose and Marks & Spencer. But the majority of people were definitely speaking Spanish and looked to be of Spanish origin. However, all the pubs were distinctly English, but we kept hearing the Spaniards, sorry Gibraltarians, ordering food in a very peculiar way; peculiar as they kept dropping English words into Spanish sentences and vice versa. The table next to us were ordering an “El Quiche with Cheesy Chips”

For once the five of us were equally confused as everybody was speaking a language that was half recognisable to us but in a way that we had never heard it before.  I guess it was Span-glish.

So, town was a no go.  It was like St Patricks Day, New Years Eve and a national Fiesta all rolled into one, and not a day for strolling the city’s ancient streets and pottering around nicky nacky noo shops.  So, we concluded that we had three main options open to us.

Option a, take the 15-minute walk to the cable car station and get the cable car to the top to look at Africa from a height and have our phones stolen by monkeys. However, for the five of us this would cost €100, and at the end of the day that money was effectively, well, lunch.

Option b was that we got the bus down to the Placa de Europa which is the tip of Gibraltar and look at Africa at sea level and then jump back on the bus for the 30-minute journey back to find somewhere to eat that would serve people not dressed in red and white.

Or option c was that we just turn back around and head back over the border and find somewhere in Spain for lunch. Option C won.

I would like to visit Gibraltar again, but not on national day. In the end we went 30 minutes back up the coast to the lovely village of Torreguardiaro and had lunch in a fish restaurant watching the sun glisten off the Mediterranean whilst admiring the rock of Gibraltar…from a distance.