Since long before I ultimately fell upon the delights of Limburger and onion at a famed destination in the warren of alleys that is lower Manhattan, scientists have been employing mice and mazes to study cognitive traits, such as learning, memory and spatial navigation. 

  Acknowledging the precarious current state of scientific funding, I might consider submitting the results of a recent search for an overnight parking spot in Cordoba should the national budgets for rodents and roquefort continue to run dry.

Press the red button and say you are going to Apartamentos San Basilio 11 

The first clue that we’d be testing for spatial navigation came when our host sent us a link directing us to the property, along with several photos of random nearby structures that were meant to guide us to where GPS had failed to take us for some reason.

we marveled at the hosts’ faith that anyone short of a Bedouin camelherder could have found this place on their own

  This harkened back to the days of yore when rural logistics were meted out by farmers and involved turns at the red barn with the white (not the black!) weathervane and the field with the Angus bull (not the Holstein you dumb city slicker!)

  Pass the arch, on the right is the apartment and on the left is the parking garage

As we continued to drive in decreasing but repetitive circles, and where a curbside waiter eventually began greeting us as valued returning customers, the scent of reward cheese continued to grow fainter. We reported back to our host that we’d been unable to identify any of the landmarks the photos had identified. (Carol had also piquantly pointed out that shoving said photos in her face while she was trying to negotiate the narrow hairpin turns of a streetscape that would one day be the model for the Chutes and Ladders gameboard, was not helping one damn bit!)

  On about our fourth pass over the same blocks our waiter signaled he was going off shift and would hand us over to his colleague who would cheerfully go over today’s specials. I begged our hosts to please, please find where we were now situated  (we were sending the photos now). After some cajoling (I informed them the prawns and gnocchi were 10 euros that evening) they agreed to meet us and we’d follow them to the apartment and parking spot.

It looked more like a deep hole in the ground than a parking garage

  Dear readers, as we snaked and slithered our way down pathways barely wide enough for a bicycle, under splendid Moorish ( or is that Moopish) arches, we marveled at the hosts’ faith that anyone short of a Bedouin camelherder could have found this place on their own – to say nothing of a pair of Americans who don’t go anywhere without Google Maps should it be merely an Albertsons we hadn’t been to before.

  The parking garage entrance required the cornering capacity of a unicycle to maneuver down and down and way down (the slope of the entrance was no doubt copied from the top of the Shellraiser roller coaster at the Meadowlands) to our spot, which was originally designed to accommodate a cat bed and litterbox. (As we were rolling our suitcases to our accommodation, another couple pulled up citing the same problems with the directions. Quite savvy, they were, they had hired a taxi and followed it to the address.)

  But what got me fired-for-life from ever mining accommodations again was discovering the bedroom to our quaint, cozy domicile for the night was atop a tight, narrow spiral staircase previously used to scale telephone poles. 

  Needless to note there’d be no cheese waiting for me at the end of this odyssey, and scientists will have to await their next shipment of mice to learn how humans originally figured out how to get around.