Spain: Hotel Apartment

We found the resort parking lot easily and we felt good as we entered a very nice clean reception area to a warm greeting. We were quickly checked-in, assured they would continue to follow up on our missing luggage for us and took our bag to our apartment. Mary and I referred to it as our apartment but Sofia apparently wanted a distinction between the resort apartment and our apartment in Prague so it was quickly dubbed our "hotel apartment" to avoid Sofia's corrections that our apartment was in Prague. The apartment had an open dining room/living room area with big sliders to a very private patio, two bedrooms, each with their own full bath and a nicely renovated kitchen with granite counters and a washing machine. Overall we were very pleased.

The resort itself is just a couple of kilometers inland from the ocean and had an indoor pool and hot tub, a heated outdoor pool and a smaller outdoor toddler pool. It also had a gym, squash courts, massage and some other amenities we never had a chance to explore. It wasn't a fancy resort but everything was very well maintained and the staff were very friendly and helpful. The resort is in the town of Calahonda, which sits roughly between Fuengirola, a crowded very busy holiday town, and Marbella, a built-up resort town that has a number of higher end resorts and marinas. Calahonda was built in the '60's as tourism began to boom in the Costa del Sol region of Spain. The town while simple and not that interesting was quiet and a good base for visting the Costa del Sol area.

By the time we arrived it was late and our goal was just to get some sleep. On Saturday we checked on the luggage and the airline still had no idea where it was so we decided we'd have to do some shopping so Ali and I (the bag with our stuff was the missing one) had bathing suits and at least something for clothes other than what we had on the plane. We were told there was a mall in Marbella so we headed over first thing. We found bathing suit, shorts and a few shirts for myself and some things for Ali as well. Unfortunately I couldn't reach my goal of getting everything I needed in one store and we had to make a few stops. The mall also had a hypermarket so we did some shopping for drinks, snacks and basic food items for breakfast and lunch. Although we didn't partake we were quite impressed by the supermarket's selection of hams (see picture). Since all of Ali's diapers were in the lost luggage we also bought diapers. The resort gave Mary 3 diapers to get Ali though but it was a relief to finally have all the diapers we would need. The shopping trip ended up taking quite a bit of time but got us all prepared for the week.

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