Day 12: South to the countryside

Definitely an interesting day today! Spent the morning relaxing and doing not much, before packing up and catching a taxi to the main station in Cordoba to pick up our rental car. Yes - rental car! We were heading to our house-sit just outside the small town of Lucena, about an hour to the south of Cordoba.

Picked up the car without a hitch, and it was an automatic so my greatest fear was thankfully unfounded. The only issue with the car (aside from it being left-hand drive) was that it was an Opel Insignia, not a large car but definitely larger than I'm used to driving. And with no parking sensors or cameras either! Quite a tight fit getting out of the carpark, requiring a few reverses and three-point turns.

Once we'd gotten out of the carpark and loaded up though it was fairly smooth sailing. Drove on the freeway down to Lucena in about an hour, and since it was lunchtime and we had about 45 minutes before our scheduled arrival at the house-sit, we had lunch in town. Navigated our way into a tiny underground carpark where I eventually managed to squeeze into a parking spot, then headed up into the main square and grabbed some pre-made pizza slices from a bakery.

Lucena seems like a very quiet town. No tourists about at all, just locals, though there isn't really any reason a tourist would come here. The central area is nice enough, lots of white buildings and little streets as usual, but lots of ugly low-rise apartment blocks too.

2pm approached, so we got back in the car and headed out to our house-sit about 10 minutes out of town. We are sitting a pair of dogs, a cat and some chooks while the usual occupants, a retired Belgian couple head back home for a week. We might be in for a difficult week since one of the dogs (Dogue) is a large Bordeaux mastiff and terrifying for Schnitzel. The other, Whimpy, is a small jack russell cross type dog and is quite old, so I imagine they'll get along fine. The cat is very old and has its own veranda cordoned off away from the other animals since it's a bit grumpy.

The couple are very nice, and after showing the house and a few things took us into town to show us the supermarket and where a few other things are. We grabbed some provisions and then shared a drink and quite bite at their favourite local tapas venue.

Back at the house, Shandos and I headed out for a walk in the olive groves with Schnitzel. The sun wasn't quite out, but it wasn't super-gloomy for a change which was nice. Countryside very pretty, with rolling hills, hundreds of rows of olive trees, and lots of country villas dotted around. This is a "summer house" area, where citizens from other European countries have a country house that they occupy during the summer. Certainly on our walk we didn't see many people, and most of the nearby villas seemed to be empty.

A little more settling in before Dominique and Isabel invited us upstairs for dinner - pasta with salmon. We brought the wine, and had a nice evening chatting away. Dominique doesn't speak much English (though he seems to understand a reasonable amount), so a lot of the time his wife was translating for him, but we managed OK. Back downstairs to our quarters which are essentially a self-contained granny flat on the ground floor of the house. Chilly out here since we're a bit higher up and the houses here are built for coolness in summer, not warmth in winter. At least from tomorrow morning we'll be upstairs in the heated areas!Read more