Trip Report: Overnight bus in Spain
To squeeze in both Córdoba and Granada after work on Friday and before Spanish class Monday morning, taking overnight buses in both directions was the only way to go. I was having problems booking my ticket online with my credit card, so off to the Valencia bus station I went (I later found out that using Paypal is a good workaround). You find the window of the bus company you're traveling on, and wait in line - my line was probably about half an hour long. Here's a view of the station when I arrived back in Valencia Monday morning.
The buses themselves were all quite new. Alsa is the umbrella brand for a lot of the bus services in Spain. All three buses I took were Alsa buses.
I seemed to have gotten the "Economy Plus" row because I had a lot of legroom from Valencia to Córdoba! This bus already was supposed to have increased legroom because it was a "Eurobus" service. I learned that there are different types of bus services including Eurobus, Supra and Premium. It's not like first and business class on an airplane - for Alsa the whole bus is a Eurobus service, or regular service, or one of the other services. So certain times will be more or less expensive than others.
Eurobus is a step up from regular, but it's not like Supra or Premium where there are only 3 seats in a row rather than the usual 4. One of the main benefits of Eurobus is supposed to be shorter trip times, though we still stopped every 30-90 minutes when the driver made announcements and lights turned on, making continuous sleep pretty much impossible. The other benefits are increased legroom, free headsets given at the ticket window to watch a movie (guess online ticket purchasers don't get this benefit), and refreshments. On my service this came in the form of a voucher, also given to me when I purchased my ticket.
I used it at the end of my journey back to Valencia, when I arrived early in the morning on a regular service bus from Granada. The cafeteria looks pretty nondescript.
But the coffee is freshly made to order - I think anything less would be a sin in Spain - and the baked goods looked "real" rather than prepackaged or bought from a Sysco-like food service supplier. Not bad!
