Mijas, Fuengirola, Cabopino (Andy's Beach)

Documenting this trip is going to be harder than I thought because I am just now realizing how much ground we covered. I wanted to be as detailed as possible in these posts for my own record but am starting to think there is no way I'll be able to keep up the detail. I'll be lucky to just get the pictures up at this point!

We visited the adorable Pueblo of Mijas up in the mountains, this little pueblo is so beautiful and just charming. I have fond memories of this place from when I was here back in 1992 and Aaron and I did a donkey tour of the village...I had a great donkey and poor Aaron had a donkey that wasn't all there, his donkey was running him into cars and not following the pack at all....I can still remember the look on Aaron's face as all of this was happening. If you know Aaron you can only imagine how happy he was about all of this. With that said, we got Andrew pumped on Mijas by telling him he would be able to ride a donkey here, and as soon as we arrived he started looking for the donkeys. I immediately thought of Aaron's experience and figured we better do a ride together as a family and not let Andrew do it by himself incase he were to get a donkey like Aaron did. So we did and he was still very excited about the little ride.

 Mijas

Our poor donkey that had to pull our family, I couldn't help but feel bad.

Andrew on the ride

all smiles after the ride

The view was absolutely amazing, and seeing the whole coastline was just beautiful. Andrew thought this stone chair was really cool and stopped to eat a cliff bar on this "cool" chair.

Strolling the kids through the narrow road, and yes cars do drive on this street.

We didn't get many family pictures so whenever someone would offer we'd take it. I sure wish Andrew would have looked at the camera, but after one day of pictures he was pretty much over it for the rest of the trip.

Such a cute village

We wanted to go to one of the highest points of the town and we knew there would be some steep climbing but this picture doesn't do the steepness justice because it was one heck of a climb. I had to get a picture of Andy pushing the kids since this is all we did the entire trip! We would take turns because it was so exhausting. Granda just about killed us but that's another story and another post. All I have to say is LUCKY KIDS as they sat back and relaxed!!!

Up at the top, so worth the climb!

 This is where the bull fighting takes place in Mijas, another lovely thing to see by doing that steep climb!

Once we left Mijas we realized we were starving and decided to go to Papa Luigi's (we did this for you Uncle Hans!) I still have a tee-shirt from this pizzeria from 1992! It is one high quality tee-shirt to have lasted this long! My Uncle Hans from Belgium introduced us to Papa Luigi's so I had to go back, and it did not dissapoint. I was hoping to get a new tee-shirt to replace my old one but they no longer sell them.

I hate posing but I had to in front of the sign

Here we are eating an early dinner at 5pm, so early for Spain that we had the place to ourselves. It was great! Andrew loves pizza so this place was just perfect for him, and so fun for me! It was like re-living my childhood. It was a special moment.

Once we finished our dinner we drove to Cabopino which is very close to where we were staying (Marbella). Originally this is where we wanted to stay. When I was researching beach houses I found a family beach in Cabopino called "Andy's Beach" and I thought it was meant to be but as I continued to research I found out that Cabopino is considered to be the gay beach of the Coasta Del Sol, and just to the right of "Andy's beach" is the nudist beach so Andy decided we should stay elsewhere. We still went to check it out though and I'm glad that we did because it was really fun. All I saw were young families, no gays or nudists so I'm not sure what the whole hype was about.

The entrance to Andy's beach! love the sign!

Andrew had a blast, he found a huge hole someone dug and jumped in it over and over.

This was the end result of all the jumping in the sand. It is one of my favorite pictures from the entire trip!Stay tuned for Granada!