The Day Goes a Bit Sideways 10-21-25

Pillars of Hercules

During the night last night, it occurred to me that we had planned to make reservations for our train journey over to Nice as soon as we got to Sevilla, so instead of the bus tour we decided to get our reservations out of the way first. That led to a bus trip over to the main train station, Santa Justa and the scrum of getting the reservations. Many years ago we were really accomplished at navigating the rail systems in Europe, now, not so much.  Before we left Denver I purchased Eurrail passes thinking that this would be the most convenient way to get around.  We love the trains and don’t feel rushed to get from point A to point B. Originally it was our plan to take two days to travel to Nice for our stay there.  In the past we took the TGV from Paris down to Nice in a 6 hour trip, so I figured the trip from Sevilla would be a bit more complicated but certainly not impossible.  Foolish me!  After an hour’s wait we got to the ticket counter to make reservations but the agent said that the tickets were not showing anywhere so we had to get that done first. To be fair however, I neglected to activate our passes so it was a visit to customer service, where the agent was able to help me get them activated, then back out to the ticket counters (and a new waiting line number). We were prepared for another wait and settled in when our original ticket man saw me and gestured us over.  So we went over our itinerary, where it became obvious that our choice was to either go all the way over to Marseille the first day or stop in Barcelona and take 3 days to get to Nice.  We opted for a long first day because the Spanish railway people can’t make

Convento de San Lorenzo

reservations for travelers on the French railway system. He could get us to Marseille more or less direct but after that we would have to get reservations from the French railway system for the trip to Nice.  Then he almost made them for tomorrow instead of Novermber 9th, luckily Deb caught it before a disaster.  Deb was a stalwart speaking in Spanish,  we have been taking Spanish lessons from a great teacher and it’s really paid off so far. So with the 30 minute bus ride each way it ended up taking 4 hours to get the reservations, pretty much shooting this day in the head. 

BTW during this whole process my phone was draining down to 10% and I was really sweating whether we could get finished so the pictures suffered.

We got off the return bus and stopped at a little taverna for a sangria and a beer with some tapas, nothing really special.  Deb went back to the apartment while I went foraging for more breakfast fixings.  Beginning tomorrow we’re really hopeful for doing something worthy of a blog originating in Spain for goodness sake!