The Fever Lever Center

The AVE was launched in 1992, and they are still adding to it, with a huge mileage of lines being built at the moment, and even more planned for the future. The powers that be are clearly quite forward thinking, as they’ve made sure that the trains and track will be compatible with the other inter-country services that already run in Europe. Hopefully this will mean that we’ll soon be able to get to Spain on the high speed train direct from Paris, or even (fingers crossed) from London!

Clare had been visiting friends in Barcelona last week, and helping them move into their new flat, just a stone’s throw from Los Ramblas. I flew in to join them on Thursday night, and we treated them to dinner at the ‘Ot’ and then we spent a rather long evening christening their new pad with an unhealthy number of bottles of local red wine.

We kicked off the morning with bread from the bakery on the ground floor, and with a clearer head than we reasonably ought to have done. Clare’s friends came as far as the station with us - although they share our love of the South-European climate, they don’t quite understand our geeky obsession with high-speed travel.

We were in Madrid in no time at all (300 kmph is particularly fast in a country the size of Spain) where we had time to grab a high portion of paella from a street stall. We’d thought about heading to Seville for the evening, but Clare didn’t fancy it, having too much the city during her coach-tour days. Instead, we settled on Cordoba - mainly because it’s an even shorter journey from Madrid, but also because they seem to have a great collection of galleries that could keep us busy for the next few day. We hopped on the station’s wireless network, and booked into NH Califa, which is just a few minutes from the Cordoba AVE station.