No problems from last night’s food—after breakfast, where we made our farewells to Deena and Harvey, we packed, and hopped into our cab at 11:00. Off to the Estación Santa Justa, named for one of the patron saints of the city, to climb aboard a nice high-speed train, which took us to Córdoba in just three quarters of an hour.

After getting settled in our hotel, we decided to have lunch right there, instead of searching for a restaurant. The hotel is on the “other” side of the Guadalquivir, a decent walk from the historic part of town. Even the appetizers turned out to be heavy and filling enough for a meal in themselves, and the full meal left us feeling somewhat lethargic. Nonetheless, we decided to go across the river to the old part of town to see what we could see in the few hours left to us. The hotel is by the old Roman bridge, which was under repair and unavailable for use. So we had to go a little farther upstream to a new bridge, and from there we went back a ways, marking the location of the Grand Mosque and the Alcázares Reales, for us to visit the next day.

Although I took about three dozen pictures this afternoon, not all that many of them were all that interesting. The next two were taken outside the precinct of the Cathedral, outside the Grand Mosque, looking in so to speak. The upper one (small image, large) is of the architectural detail above a doorway, in the lower one (small image, large) you’re looking through a doorway into the Cathedral grounds.

Below (small image; large), Mark looks out onto the Roman bridge from a fairly high vantage point on the north bank of the river. From there, we walked westward, in other words away from the bridge we had crossed on, to another vehicular bridge, from which we walked eastward along the river bank to our hotel. We were still feeling bloated from our huge lunch, and went to bed early, as well as both drinkless and supperless, to sleep long and soundly, in preparation for one of the best tourist days of the trip.