Day 1 I’ve been very busy lately and finally had a bit of time to finish posting on our Andulusian adventure. We started our trip in Madrid and finished our trip in Madrid. We left the house in Las Pinedas on a Sunday morning and headed back to Córdoba. I think safe to say that we all napped some more on the two hour ride back to Madrid. The check in process at our hostal was pretty slow. The landlord was overwhelmed by the number of people that were checking out and in that morning. A hostal is a small private run hotel that previously might have someone’s large multi-room home. The place I had reserved rooms at was small but clean and very cheap. We paid an average of 22 euros for each room. One ... read more

The Alhambra is a very large complex. One cannot amble about the place in one day. Furthermore, reservations are required for certain parts of the Alhambra because only small groups are allowed into those places at staggered times. If you miss your time slot you are out of luck. And further…furthermore, this is one of the top tourist places in Spain. Do you know what that means? There are hordes of tourists. I don’t do hordes. I can’t be part of a horde. It’s hard to amble when you are in a horde…know what I mean? Our landlord had recommended that we make reservations for the 11:30 time slot. Well, I figured out that we just get there in the morning and make a reservation for later in the afternoon. Nope. It was already sold out ... read more

We decided that we would go to Córdoba later in the afternoon and stay until the evening and eat supper there. It was Jill´s 26th birthday and she wanted to have some kind of unique celebration. I suggested that we do a tapas crawl. For the uninitiated, tapas are small plates of appetizer snacks. A meal can be made by trying a variety of small dishes. There are also ½ raiciones, these are equal in quantity to about two tapas dishes. Then there are the full raiciones, these are regular plate size servings. More on the tapas crawl later. We also had decided to sleep in late and drive into the small neighboring town of La Carlota for a bit more grocery shopping and looking around. One of the students had come down with a sore ... read more

My objective today was to visit Jaen and Zuheros or Baena. And we wanted to lay in some food supplies for the week. And we wanted to cook at the house that evening. Ummm yeah…that was too tall an order to fill. The day didn’t quite work out the way in which I had envisioned. First of all, for those of you that may or may not know, Beth & I are teaching at the same school. I am teaching Spanish. I believe that for someone acquiring a second language, classroom study is too much an abstract environment and some level of immersion is really needed to achieve some level of competency. Plus, I am an enthusiastic advocate of traveling and having what I call “the authentic experience.” I also tell my students to: “Live the ... read more

We flew into Madrid and arrived at 7AM. The next leg of the journey was to take the high speed AVE train to Córdoba and pick up our rental vehicle at the train station. Although one does not necessarily have to make reservations for the train, I thought it would be prudent to have assured seats since I was not familiar with the amount of travelers on a Sunday afternoon. Tip: Although RENFE (the Spanish train company) has an online reservation site and it also offers discounts for reservations online, that proved to be an impossible task to accomplish. Beth and I tried for two successive days and finally gave up. While I was doing additional research for ticket purchasingI did find a reference to a company’s website through which one can purchase discount tickets for ... read more