Checked out of room near Málaga airport and drove north towards Córdoba. By the time
shalmestere was awake and functional, the hotel's breakfast buffet was closed, so we planned to find brunch on the way.
There's one town of any size between Málaga and Córdoba: Antequera, which I'd never heard of before starting to research this trip, but it apparently has an impressive Moorish fortress and a couple of Neolithic dolmens. So we headed into the town center to find food. It was pouring rain, and not quite noon, and Good Friday, so not much was open, but here's what appears to be the main church in town:
We eventually found a pastelería crowded with locals, saw somebody getting up to leave, nabbed their table, and had some delicious croissants and thick drinking chocolate. And by the time that was over, the rain had mostly stopped. Walked up
to the hilltop Moorish fortress, the Alcazaba, which was captured by Ferdinand I de Aragón (whose grandson Ferdinand II married Isabella de Castilla) in 1410 after a months-long siege. Entry to the fortress compound (of 62,000 m
2) is through an arch that was originally Roman, then Visigothic, then reworked by the Moors, then reworked again by Ferdinand

who, on the day of his victory, not only reconsecrated the mosque inside the fortress as a Christian church, but ordered the construction of a new larger church just outside the walls but still near the top of the hill.

The Alcazaba compound includes remnants of Roman housing, a Visigothic church, and the aforementioned mosque as well as the towers and barbican walls that make it a military stronghold.
Walked back down the hill, retrieved the car, and headed off to see the megalithic dolmens. Two of them are in town, next to a Ford dealership ("Auto Dolmens"), behind a fence and an admission office that was closed for Good Friday. The third is a few km outside town, next to a rock quarry or something, with no admission office but behind a fence and a gate that was closed for Good Friday. So that didn't work.
shalmestere suggested we return on the third day to see whether the rock has been rolled aside....
Anyway, in frustration at the rain and the dolmen closures, we stopped at McDonald's (not terribly different from a US McDonald's except for the names of the sandwiches: the Whopper approximation is named the McExtreme), ate a late lunch, and drove towards Córdoba under sunshine and blue skies.
For our two nights in Córdoba, I had reserved a room in a youth hostel -- not so much because it's cheap as because it's well-located in the historic district. However, the hostel has no "front desk staff"; you contact them a day or two in advance to make arrangements for check-in. I had done that, and Friday morning I received an e-mail (forwarded through Orbitz) asking for my e-mail address and phone number, so I sent those. At lunchtime I checked my e-mail and found one with an "online check-in" link where I could provide my phone number (again), e-mail address (again), and scans of passports. So I did that from the McDonald's parking lot, although there was some confusion with the online check-in form.
An hour later, when we reached Córdoba's historic district, I followed Google Maps directions to the hostel (which ended probably 50m away from the hostel, since Google Maps thought incorrectly that the last 50m was pedestrian-only), checked my e-mail again, and found nothing. I parked in a tiny square, not blocking traffic, and left
shalmestere to guard the car while I walked to the hostel and tried to negotiate our way in. I e-mailed again, I text-messaged, I phoned, and after several tries I got somebody on the phone who said I needed to provide my phone number (yet again), my e-mail address (yet again), and upload scans of both passports (I had only seen a place to upload one at lunchtime, and that one apparently hadn't gone through). So I did all that. The guy wanted to communicate on WhatsApp, of course, which I didn't have, so we did most of this by e-mail. I got an e-mail saying "OK, I will send you the code to get in the front door." Ten minutes later I e-mailed him again asking where the code was, what room we were in, and how to get a room key; no reply. Another fifteen minutes later I e-mailed him again asking the same questions; no reply. (This whole time
shalmestere was sitting in the car 50m away, probably illegally parked, fuming and sending me increasingly aggrieved text messages.) So another ten minutes later I called the guy on the phone to ask the same questions, and he said he'd sent me an e-mail with all that information half an hour ago. He sent the e-mail again, I saw the subject line pop up briefly on my phone screen, but then couldn't find it in either my inbox or my spam folder. So he dictated the information over the phone, I got into the building, got the key, found the room, dropped my suitcase in the room, and told both him and
shalmestere that everything was (finally!) resolved.
I returned to the car (still illegally parked with the blinkers on), gave
shalmestere the room key and the instructions, and had her take her suitcase to the room while I looked for a place to park the car legally. It took probably ten minutes, a certain amount of scraping, and the assistance of several locals just to get the car turned around and pointed the right direction (the car is classified as "compact", and
looks like a small car by US standards, but it's actually fairly large by local standards and has way too large a turning radius to maneuver in a medieval city!) Google Maps told me there were two parking establishments a 5-minute walk away, but when I got there, I saw nothing but a couple of bars. So I followed the hostel manager's recommendation to a place 15 minutes' walk away, on the other side of the river. There were police cars and people setting up barricades to block off the street for a Good Friday procession, but I was the last car across the bridge before they blocked it. The parking turns out to be not a commercial parking garage, but a free public parking lot. And since it had been raining much of the day, it was a very
muddy public parking lot.

Anyway, I left the car there and walked back to the youth hostel, across a crowded pedestrian bridge over a rain-swollen Guadalquivir river.

shalmestere didn't want to leave the room for dinner, so I went out looking for take-out, in a crowd of tapas-crawlers; eventually grabbed some
empanadas and
patatas fritas and brought them back to the room. Fall down go boom.
Today, we see what we can of Córdoba. It's supposed to be raining off and on all day today and tomorrow. Hope the parking lot doesn't flood.