The Road To Ronda (Part I)

Sure, the guidebook said that the road to Ronda was one of the most winding and dangerous in Spain.

But in my defense, it also said that it used to be a lot worse. And didn’t it just show my confidence in my brother’s driving that I didn’t warn him about the perilous path ahead until the very last possible moment, as the small compact we’d rented started its gradual ascension up the mountain’s side?

“This road’s supposed to be a little rough,” I blurted out from the back seat.

“No kidding,” he answered a few minutes later, the road steeply snaking the mountain’s edge, Dave tensely taking the sharp turns as Spanish tractor trailers passed us at top speed.

The road was paved and there was a guardrail – two features, my guidebook told me, that were relatively new – but as the car quickly gained altitude and the view beyond the guardrail looked all the more precarious, that offered us little in the way of confidence. Especially when, along one turn, we saw the guardrail ripped to shreds.

The small gravestone at the side of the road didn’t help much either.

It was our last day in the south of Spain, though, and my turn to choose the daily destination. It’d been a trip born in compromise, and that’s how it was being carried out as well. My two brothers and I had won the week’s excursion with a raffle ticket my father bought, finally settling on Spain as a destination after much discussion, something in the way of: “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” “I don’t know, where do you want to go?”

Eventually, someone made the decision and the south of Spain was it. But we weren’t finished with the compromise quite yet. After the first day – spent exploring the Costa Del Sol communities of Málaga and Torremolinos, where we stayed – everyone was given the chance to choose a daily destination. My choice was Ronda. And I wasn’t letting any precarious mountain drive get in my way.

But then, I wasn’t the one driving.

“I’m glad I’m not driving,” I told Dave. He just grunted in response.

Later, though, he’d tell us that compared to driving through the Spanish cities of Málaga and Granada – with the haphazard directions, scarcity of street signs, and scooters weaving in and out of traffic – this was a whole lot less stressful. Which made me feel better then. But at that moment, driving up the mountain into Ronda – as I looked to my left to see the sharp cliff on the other side of a misshapen guardrail – all I could imagine was plummeting off the mountain’s edge.

Which wouldn’t have been the best way to end a European vacation.

To be continued Wednesday…

Photo: Ronda, Spain, November 2003 – LV.

Posted by Lisa.

~ by Lisa on February 25, 2008.