Saturday 19th December Jerez-Cordoba We were still on the hunt for the sherry so set off for the railway station via a great little bodega recommended by the barman at the hotel. At 10am it was full of men drinking sherry but again we drew a blank. Plenty of ordinary Sherries but no VORS. So off to Seville where we had a train change en route to Cordoba which gave us the opportunity to finally find what we wanted in the Barbadillo sherry shop. We really enjoy biking in Seville now we know where we are going and whizzed around the streets avoiding trams and people. This time there were a lot of Christmas market stalls thrown in to add to the general confusion. Lovely sun again so ate a picnic in a park quickly before heading on to Cordoba. What an amazing city this is. So full of history with a much more Moorish feel than some of the others we have visited. It was at one stage the most important Moorish town and the biggest Muslim mosque back in the 700-900 Cs. Before this the Romans had also lived there so there is quite a Roman feel to the architecture as well and a great many buildings and ruins to look at. Going to Cordoba was one of those ‘have to do things’ (especially as the current King Cordwainer, Ollie Chamberlain, lives in Dorset) and getting there by train is easy. The trains have bike compartments too and Spanish rail don’t even charge for a bike. After Cordoba we were planning to take the train on south to Malaga. However this is when our failure to plan ahead sufficiently really hit us. We thought we’d be really efficient and buy our tickets for tomorrow as soon as we arrived at the station only to be greeted with a devastatingly dismissive shrug and the words NO bikes on the train to Malaga. You’ve got to be kidding we said. Nope. Too many details to go into but we wasted an awful lot of time trying to sort out alternatives without resorting to the motor car. It was arctic (well not like the U.K. type arctic) but much colder than recently. We stayed in a little hostel/hotel which was old fashioned but with lots of atmosphere. In the restaurant where we had supper we ordered ‘dos Manzanilla por favor’ and were back to the old problem of being given two herbal teas. The waiter said we were in the wrong area for sherry (only 50 miles away from Jerez) and in Cordoba they drink Montilla instead. So we swopped the tea for a couple of those, it was nice but not quite as good as sherry. On Sunday we got up really early (7.30 which is v early for us, and it is still dark) as the Cathedral/Mosque is only open for 2 hours. It is an extraordinary mishmash of architecture. We knew exactly where it was having walked around it last night but when we set off down the myriad of narrow lanes and streets we became totally disorientated and completely lost. But we did find a very impressive wall plaque put there by the ‘cordwainers’ which is about the only evidence that we saw of their existence in the town. Oliver tells me that next year a team of Cordwainers are going to cycle from Cordoba to London – good luck to them I say the Spanish countryside is not exactly like Holland, but I dare say they’ll have extremely comfortable soft leather linings to their cycle shorts, and probably leather saddles too!