In His Footsteps: The Places I've Seen: Gibraltar

Gibraltar is probably one of the oddest places I’ve been to, ever. Picture this: driving along the Mediterranean coast among rolling hills and then through a smoggy oil refinery town. Suddenly in front of you out of nowhere is a cliff, shear and white on one side and a tree-covered slope down to the water on the other. Maybe it was a leftover from the Alps. Maybe God had a little piece left so He dropped it on the edge of the continent. :P

View from the airstrip before crossing over.

The main purpose of the trip was an all-day fundraiser for the Ark Christian School. About 25 students and teachers met at Morrisons, which is a British grocery/department store, to bag customer’s purchases for donations. Because I was just a volunteer at the school I sneaked off for a couple hours in the afternoon.

Gibraltar is a bewildering conglomeration of old British military fort, narrow winding streets, and modern, but run-down, buildings. The country is so small that you have to drive across the airstrip to get to town. Of course all traffic stops when planes are taking-off or landing.

A piece of the old British fort

The main transit station

Good ol' Union Jack!

And there are monkeys! Usually they stay up in the forest area, but I was fortunate enough that there was a family down visiting town for the day; a mummy, daddy, baby and some siblings or cousins

I took a bus out to Europa point, and could barely see an outline of Africa in the distance because it was misty. I also got a glimpse of the tunnels that apparently are drilled all through the rock and are still used for British military training. Then I bused back to town, walked up the main street and back to Morrisons in time to help with bagging groceries for rush hour.