Today was a travel day, but, despite arising at 5:00 AM to a message that our cab had been canceled, and the day including a 3-hour flight (Dublin to Málaga) and an hour-long train ride (Málaga to Córdoba), we still managed to walk 20,000+ steps (which is a lot). We had given ourselves plenty of buffer to get to the airport, so we had time to stand in a long line to grab a mediocre breakfast before our flight....
We decided yesterday that today would be a rest day. We slept in, but both got up around the same time—some time between 8:00 and 9:00—and both went for a run (separately—Benton was going to run farther and faster). We came back to the flat, cooled off a bit, and then walked to a nearby supermarket to load up on some groceries. The “dark variety of tomatoes”—legitimately nestled in between more typical looking tomatoes—turned out to be…plums....
We kicked off today with a 2-hour guided bike tour, which we figured would give us a good lay of the land overall. We were right…and expect to use this technique in future stops. Four of the big takeaways from that tour (aside from getting an overview of the geography and various old city boundaries): There were many mosques in the city that were all built by the Moors (although older Roman features of the city are still visible here and there); when the Moors were driven out by the Christians, these mosques were either destroyed outright or converted into Catholic churches, In many cases of the latter, the mosque was, essentially, retrofitted to be a Catholic church (the Mezquito Catedral is a massive variation of this), Any round windows or “keyhole” arches/windows on a Catholic church is a remnant of the original mosque....
This was a “hit some smaller sights” day. Tim ran before breakfast, and Benton, who presumably wanted to sweat more, ran before lunch. In between, we toured a few sites: The Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos (Castle of the Christian Monarchs) has an impressive and structured garden with various rectangular pools (there is also the castle, but that was, relatively speaking, small—a single level with some impressive tile mosaics on some of the walls)...
We rented mountain bikes and road 5 miles out to Medina Azahara (Madinat al-Zahra), which was a Muslim city created in the mid-10th century that was active for all of…70 years. It was destroyed and looted over the subsequent years/centuries, but still has many of the ruins visible and is an active archaeological site to this day. We took a less-than-directly-direct route to the site (at the advice of the fellow at the bike store), which took us along a canal and past various olive orchards with a view into the surrounding mountains....
Our final full day in Córdoba was pretty quiet. We went out for breakfast (toast with olive oil and tomato sauce; fresh-squeezed orange juice) and then walked across the Roman bridge so Benton could replicate a nighttime shot during the day, then back across the bridge and off to find a sculpture honoring the patios of the town that had just been unveiled on Tuesday. It was the third of three planned installations in squares around town, and our bike tour guide had taken us to it to see if it had yet been unveiled (it had not)....
This was a travel day—a reasonably easy one for us, but a much more painful one for Julie and Alana. We had a pretty leisurely morning, as we finished off our remaining groceries for breakfast, did a light cleaning of the apartment, and then headed to the train station. We had a 2-hour train ride from Córdoba to Madrid, and then a slightly shorter train from Madrid to València. Aside from some platform confusion in Madrid that resulted in some unplanned sprinting, that trip went off as planned....
Folks were clearly tired from the previous day’s travels. Tim got up around 7:30 and went for a slow 3-mile run, but there was no other movement in the apartment until comfortably after 10:30 AM (Benton’s alarm went off at 8:45, but that was his first alarm, which Tim has learned is just part of The Process; the second alarm…inadvertently did not get set). We all headed out around noon for a stroll into the old city and to get SIMs so Julie and Alana would have working phones....
In order to enable Benton to get to the Valencia airport in time to greet Lucy on her delayed flight, Tim went back and forth with a bike tour to get the start of the tour moved from 10:30 to 9:30 AM. Of course, once that ball was well in motion…Lucy’s travel got further delayed such that she arrived by train from Madrid rather than by plane from Lisbon. That meant that it was a little bit needlessly hurried to get everyone up, fed (Benton’s go-to breakfast of eggs, spinach, tomatoes, and cheese…and potatoes this morning) and out the door by 9:00 AM, but we did it!...
Tim and Alana took a walk to “Parc Central” this morning—lots of fountains and shallow canals, with lots of dogs playing in them. Plus, a huge, adult-sized slide (Tim’s shorts were slick enough to slide right down; Alana’s were not) and a couple of climbing wall structures. After breakfast, Benton, Lucy, and Tim headed out and rented e-scooters for three hours. They rode to the City of Arts and Sciences so Lucy could see that compound, then returned up through the greenbelt to check out various parks and gardens and sites farther up....
Julie booked a 3-hour boat rental today. It was a “no license needed” boat, so relatively small (but large enough to go onto the Mediterranean on a calm day) and with only a 15 HP motor that actually seemed to have a governor on it (“wide open” was still “moving a pretty plodding pace”). We motored out and down the beach, dropping anchor a couple of times to swim and cool off....
This was largely a travel day, in that we had an 11:15 train (which didn’t leave until closer to 11:40) from Valencia to Barcelona. We had a slow-ish morning getting ready to leave, and then we arrived at the apartment in Barcelona 12 minutes before 3:00 and had to wait until 3:00 for the digital key to work to unlock the doors. The apartment is…underwhelming: a noisy A/C, some olive oil in a puddle on the kitchen counter, doors that stick, and a shower that seems to have a completely unsealed drain, which means that it leaks water all over the floor and is unusable....
The main activity today was a guided bike tour. Compared to the ones we did in Cordoba and Valencia, this one was a little disappointing, Partly due to the sprawl of the city, and partly due to the pretty commercial nature of the company we booked with, we spent 45 minutes essentially standing around before we got started, and then had 2.5 hours to very slowly ride around the city to stop at four points of interest where our guide gave us a brief overview of what we were looking at and then gave us a few minutes to wander around....
Julie and Tim went to breakfast this morning and then returned to get Alana up. They headed for the airport at 10:30 for a 1:15 flight…and were at the gate by 11:15! As of this writing, they are on a plane from Amsterdam to JFK, so smooth sailing thus far. Benton, Tim, and Lucy proceeded to have one of those 20,000-step days: took the metro to get close to Park Güell, which meant a lonnnnnng and pretty steep uphill climb…only to find out that tickets needed to be purchased, and there were no tickets available until 4:00 that afternoon....
After yesterday’s outing, we decided to take it pretty easy today, so Benton and Lucy slept in and then went for a leisurely breakfast, while Tim organized photos and read. It was nice to cross the threshold of noon without having applied any sunscreen. And 1:00, for that matter. And 2:00. And, by golly, why not go for the whole day! We did head out for a tour of Casa Milà (La Pedrera), which was a house / apartment building that Gaudí designed that was built between 1906 and 1912....
We said goodbye to Barcelona this morning (although we’ll be back in two sleeps to return the rental car and to catch a train to Avignon). The car rental pickup went pretty smoothly, and we even were granted the elusive free upgrade to a small SUV. Still stick, of course, but Benton commented it was nice to be back to driving on the right hand side of the road. We stopped for lunch in a little town called Ainsa just because it was a good time to stop and we were about an hour from our destination for the day....
Today was our main hike in the Ordesa Valley: Cascada de la Cola de Caballo. We wanted to get an early-ish start, but we also need to hit the grocery for some extra water and snacks, and it wasn’t clear when those options would open up. So we headed out at 8:00, found an open cafe for some breakfast, and then found a grocery that had just opened. From there, it was on to the shuttle into the park, and we started the hike promptly at 9:30....