Cordoba calls to us

Sevilla to Cordoba (by train) to Valencia (by car)

Day 13 - Saturday - June 25
We had originally planned to go to Granada after Sevilla but after checking out access to the trains decided that Cordoba was a better choice. Donna's mom had also recommended the Catherdral of Cordoba.  Besides, the Alhambra in Granada is the most visited site in Spain and you have to have tickets in advance...not our forte. We were at the train station in fine time thanks to the wonderful bike boulevards and yesterday's scouting trip. There were several restaurants in the station and other stores as well. It was already 81F when we left at 9:00.

There was a special car for bicycles with a little ramp from the train to the platform and we just rolled right on.....and off.

The Cordoba train station. The bus station was right across the street. We had decided to go to Valencia to get far enough north to be out of the heat. The only problem was the trains that direction don't take bikes so we planned to take the bus. However, when we tried to buy our tickets, we were informed that the buses would only take one bike at a time (despite the fact that only 2 days earlier we had definitely had 2 bikes on that bus). So we were forced to abandon our attempts at sticking with public transportation and rent a car. Fortunately the Hertz Rent-a-Car office was right across from the bus ticket office. The very nice clerk arranged for us up to pick up the car Sunday morning.

Off to find our hotel, always a bit of a challenge in these large cities.......

.......especially when they are on a very narrow one-way street with no big signs.

Our room wasn't quite ready so we went to the nearest pastry shop for lunch. There was an amazing variety of sweets, sandwiches and chocolate. Donna is checking out the chocolate.

After getting our room at 1:00 we set off on foot towards the cathedral. This is an example of the courtyards behind all those heavy doors we passed along the way.

Cordoba's Roman wall from the 1st century AD. The Jewish Quarter and oldest part of the city is inside.  

This woman was begging money from all passersby. Just  after we passed her, two fortunetellers approached us, took our hands, handed us a piece of sage, and started telling our fortunes. It was all in Spanish and we understood almost nothing but it was still entertaining. Of course they wanted money at the end. We each gave them something but didn't give them their asking price so they kept babbling at us as we walked away. It would have been more helpful if we had run into them earlier when we were dealing with the bus! They might have saved us some time.

This was such a lovely and unusual door that Donna had to take a picture.........Doug was patient.

This is the entrance to the grounds of the Cathedral of Cordoba also formerly a grand mosque. The whole structure is a unique mixture of Moorish and Catholic architecture and traditions.

Looking back from the doors in the picture before this one.

This is what you see when you first walk inside. It was also about 20 degrees cooler.

This is an excavation of the Christian church over which the mosque was built.

This is where the choir is supposed to sit.....just slightly more ornate than our spot in St. Helen's back in Sweet Home!

This place is so immense that pictures can't do it justice at all but we tried.

One of the two pipe organs. This one had some kind of horn.

This is a recent addition commemorating those whose lost their life during the religious persecutions of the 1930's.

This guy thought Donna was taking a nap but she was only trying to get a good picture of the ceiling. However  napping  at that point had some appeal. 

Those are Roman era water works in the river. Those Romans were quite the engineers.

This view gives you a little better sense of how the cathedral was placed on top and in the center of the mosque. There were some other crazy tourists out in the sun in 109F heat with us. We weren't there long, finding a very shady route back to the hotel.

The laundry was almost dry when we returned from our wanderings. We had dinner at a little pasta place close by. Soon after we arrived, a bunch of young people started sitting all around our table. They were from the University of Alabama, here studying Spanish language and culture. They were between terms and happy to have the weekend off from their studies. We enjoyed our time hearing about their experiences. From there we went to mass at the small church a block from the hotel, St. Nicholas de la Villa. We got there at 8:02pm and they were already on the 2nd reading. That was OK though because we didn't understand any of the words. It was nice to share the sign of peace and communion, which need no translation.

Day 14 - Sunday - June 26
We fit our bikes into the Opel rental car, only having to take off Doug's front  rack. It was stuffed full though. We had 550km "free" to get us to Valencia and we planned to use most of them.

All those dots between the roads are olive trees.........miles and miles of them. No wonder they serve them as hors d'ouerves at every meal.

We aren't tilting at windmills yet but who knows?? We were really glad to see the temperature drop as we approached the coast.

Really big windmills! We reached Valencia at 510 km and 5pm. The five-lane-wide traffic circles filled with cars took 10 years off Doug's life.....or so he says. It was VERY stressful......would have been a lot easier on a bike.....but we eventually found the train station where we could return the car. Finding the hotel was even more challenging. The clerk gave us really good directions for returning the car and we still had to do one traffic circle twice. We took a bus back to the hotel and were very, very happy to be done with the car and driving. This bus, like others we've ridden in Portugal and Spain, had a video screen that shows the route and stops. It also had "Stop Smoking" messages that ran in between. Both Spain and Portugal have made restaurants smoke-free zones, another reason that outside seating is so popular.